Annie and the Wolves

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  I understand you talk with patients who are likewise fixated on disturbing images or memories, and so I came to you. But please understand that my case is both similar and different. Whereas your patients visit their enemies only in nightmares or hallucinations, you must entertain the idea that I can visit mine on a physical plane, or nearly so, though it has not proven easy.

  The hope I cultivated when I first came to you, that if I had a listener and this journey were not made entirely alone, I would not suffer the physical effects as strongly, does not seem to be well founded. Perhaps we are always alone. Frank is good to me, but he doesn’t understand. Even if I tried to explain, he would not see things from my side, because his soul is simply too light for it. I have ruined a marriage or come close to it because I can’t better control my own darkness.

  My hand shakes violently now. When I travel by train overnight, I keep a revolver under my small pillow, but if I had to use it? My aim would be less than perfect. Keeping my appearance tidy with no one to help me is a problem. This sounds like a small thing, but I assure you, with reporters waiting everywhere the train stops, it is not inconsiderable. They surely see my unkempt hair and loose clothing. I try to hide my shaking hand by tightly gripping a closed umbrella or propping the object in my lap with the hand completely hidden in the umbrella’s folds.

  Even my vision is worsening. Yet I still take hope in what I know of your last patient, that she suffered worse symptoms than mine and those symptoms, bad as they were, vanished as soon as she faced her demons . . .

  The phone went dark.

  37

  Ruth

  Ruth exited the bus station’s double doors, looking for a cab. And there was Scott.

  He’d been leaning against a post, staring down at his phone, hair rumpled and brow furrowed until he looked up and saw her. The transformation in his expression—relief, anticipation—made her fatigue vanish. It had been months since she’d seen him look irrefutably happy to see her, since she’d seen herself reflected in someone else’s eyes as a person anxiously desired.

  He rushed forward, ready to take her bookbag and her overnight wheelie. When he was close enough to give her an awkward side hug, she smelled it. He’d been drinking.

  “I was waiting for you,” he said. “You didn’t answer my texts.”

  “My phone died.” She pulled away from the sideways embrace in order to study him better.

  “You look a little . . . buzzed.”

  “Do I?” He laughed. “I guess I was waiting a while. Bar across the street, since school let out. You seem a little worse for wear yourself. You’re shivering.”

  “The bus was drafty.”

  “Drafty? You’re shaking like someone just pulled you out of a hole in the ice.”

  They put her things in his car and paused at the trunk. She put a hand on his wrist. “Something up with Margot?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Are you still together?”

  “Actually, as of last night . . . we’re not.”

  “So, it is about Margot.”

  “Things started changing last weekend after I came to your house to pick up my stuff. That brought some things to the surface. She wanted to move fast. I realized I’d never meant to get that involved in the first place.”

  “Is she taking it badly?”

  He screwed up his face. “A little.”

  “But this isn’t about Margot?”

  “To be honest, I didn’t think about Margot once today. That’s the point.”

  “What happened today?”

  He evaded her glance and walked toward the driver’s side. She followed. “Bad afternoon at school. I’ll tell you on the way. Come on, let’s get you warm.”

  “Scott.” She touched his arm. “I’m not going to let you drive. I’m so grateful you came to get me, but I think you’re tipsier than you realize.”

  His eyebrows went up. “So . . . we’re going to sit around drinking coffee somewhere until I sober up?”

  She held out her hand. When he didn’t surrender the keys, she plunged her hands into her coat pockets, ready to stand there as long as it took.

  He shook his head. “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s time.”

  “I’m worried you’re not ready. What’s it been—over a year?”

  “Two.” She tried not to give away her uncertainty. From the waist up, she probably looked confident enough, chin up and lips pressed together. From the waist down, she was shaking. To quiet her trembling fingers, she pushed them deeper into her coat pockets. Then she felt it: the hard little corner of something, a broken breath mint or something better. She pinched it between two fingers. She could already imagine with pleasure the chalky feeling of the dry pill in her throat.

  “I hope it’s like riding a bike,” he said. Scott looked up and down the street again, as if another solution might present itself. While his face was turned, she withdrew her hand and popped the half-bar of Xanax in her mouth with a strange sort of glee. So she did have a little bit left. Angels were smiling.

  It was supposed to take a full hour to kick in, but that couldn’t be true, because she felt immediate relief.

  “Just—don’t talk. I’m dying to hear about your day. But not yet.”

  “I can’t believe you’re driving. That’s great.”

  “Please,” she said, checking her blind spot with the purposeful caution of a teenager taking her first driving exam. “Be quiet. Don’t jinx it.”

  Setting the parking brake an hour later, she felt her skin tingle with adrenalized pleasure. Any pharmacological contributions to that sensation were forgotten. They had arrived.

  Inside the house, Ruth pulled a half-eaten lasagna out of the fridge and started rewarming it. Scott opened the fridge door, looking for another beer, but there were none in the house.

  “Another life change, I see.”

  He didn’t need another, but it was clear he was still on edge. Drinking had been her problem in the past, not his.

  “Why don’t you finish telling me what happened at work,” she said, reaching up to a cupboard to pull down two plates.

  When she turned, he was directly in front of her, mouth nearly on hers.

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  She neither resisted nor fully responded, at least not for that first, infinitesimally small moment. This was why people fought and got back together, to have that first kind of uncertain kiss again—the kind when you didn’t know if the other person would pull away or rush ahead. The uncertainty itself was a time-stopping intoxicant. No yesterday, no tomorrow.

  She returned the pressure of the kiss. He took the plates out of her hands and set them on the counter.

  “So,” she said, tasting the beer on his breath and wishing he were one hundred percent sober, wishing he weren’t involved with anyone else, even if that entanglement was nearly over. She whispered, “This isn’t like you.”

  He broke off, eyes still closed, and rested his forehead against hers. “I know.”

  “I don’t want you to make a mistake. I don’t want us . . .”

  “I know. But what if everything else in the last year was a mistake? What if this is the first thing that’s not a mistake?”

  Later, after they’d come out of the bedroom and eaten the lasagna, Scott told her what had happened in his classroom. How he’d watched his students tweeting, texting, recording. How he’d waited for the shattering of glass and the spray of bullets.

  “And I thought, damn, I’m almost forty years old. I’m a single guy living in a shitty apartment.” He stabbed with too much enthusiasm at the last bite of lasagna on his plate. Sauce flew.

  “There,” she said, “on your sleeve. No, the left one.”

  He
dabbed at the cuff, which only made the stain worse. “It was like a freeze frame. Like I could see myself from the outside, sitting with my legs out in front of me, this stupid look on my face, utterly incompetent.”

  “Why incompetent?”

  “My private life isn’t so great, but worse than that, I’m teaching in a school that can’t even keep its kids safe. Because that should be the one . . . the one thing.” He looked down, blinking hard. “It’s not like I haven’t thought it before. When we do those drills? We’re inflicting trauma. These kids are training their brains every day: This is how life is. Be afraid, the one time in your life when you have the innate right to be reckless.”

  Ruth nodded. She had said as much in the past, but he hadn’t wanted to hear it.

  “Today, I saw a hundred different ways that anyone with the right weapon could kill dozens of kids before anyone knew anything, and no stupid drill is going to change that.” He paused. “You’re staring at something.”

  “No.” She was trying to avoid seeming distracted. First the sauce on his cuff, now this. But how could she resist staring? “Gray hair. Just a strand.” She reached up to touch his temple. “I didn’t see it before.”

  He laughed. “I think I got it today.”

  “No, really. When did this show up?”

  She wanted to pluck it out. She wanted to follow him around, day after day, ready to pluck the next one, too.

  Scott reached for her hand and pulled it down, to clasp it between his own.

  Ruth thought with effort, Nothing bad is going to happen.

  “To wrap things up,” he said.

  “Oh, I thought you’d already wrapped up. I’m sorry.”

  “Ruth, listen to me.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I thought . . . This is not the life I meant to have. I had the life I wanted to have, or almost, two years ago. I let it—we let it—get away from us.”

  Ruth shared in his desire to reverse everything and start over. But something nagged at her. Not guilt or sympathy for Margot. Something else was wrong.

  From their first kiss in the kitchen to their first full embrace in bed, Scott’s body had felt foreign to her. In some ways, it should have. They hadn’t slept together for well over a year, and she was heavier than she’d once been, while he’d not only lost the weight he’d gained during their breakup but gone beyond, cycling his way toward extreme fitness. He was more muscular in a few places, dramatically thinner in others. “You never step into the same river twice,” said Heraclitus. Scott was a different man.

  After they’d finished making love but before they roused themselves to rescue the dry, overheated lasagna, she’d noted the difficulty of finding a comfortable position while nestling into his shoulder. She was imagining a different body, a broader chest, not Scott’s; a tickle of hair against her own neckbone, not Scott’s. She tried to ignore the associations, because they weren’t fair, they weren’t right. She had never consciously compared Scott to any other man before, much less to a man she hadn’t seen in years. She was thinking of Joe, and it didn’t even make her feel guilty, as if she had recently been Joe’s partner, as if Joe weren’t even married and a father, as if Scott were the interloper. What did Joe have to do with any of this?

  Something isn’t right.

  “Maybe the false alarm at the school was a good thing,” Scott said. “Maybe it was the wake-up call I needed.” He reached out again to take her hand across the table. “What do you think?”

  She’d been distracted, thinking of an image—that narrow-hipped boy, she was sure of that now, propped up by his elbows, the rest of his body mostly hidden in the grass. “Sorry. About what?”

  “About us.”

  She deflected. “Wait, did you tell me what led to the lockdown?”

  “Caleb Hill.” The name was vaguely familiar to Ruth. “Supposedly, he said something about wanting to hurt someone. But then they questioned another sophomore, and that first kid took it all back. We’ve got no proof Caleb planned to do anything. The school knew less at four o’clock than it did at two. I expect we’ll hear more in the morning. They asked us to come in early for another debrief.”

  Scott stood up to clear the dishes. The sight of him setting each plate in the sink and filling the crusty lasagna pan with soap and water to soak was such a portrait of normalcy that Ruth was afraid of moving an inch, lest she disrupt it.

  She asked, “Do you think this kid actually has violent tendencies?”

  “No idea.” Then he remembered and brightened. “But the debrief at the end of the day did give me a chance to sit next to John Regatta. You remember him? Phys ed teacher?”

  “I think so.”

  “Great news. Well—it’s half great, half sad, but you’ll be relieved. I talked to him about Van Vorst.”

  “You told him our suspicions?”

  “Your suspicions, and not quite.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Van Vorst has leukemia.” Scott waited as Ruth absorbed the news. “He’s had it since Regatta got hired. That means at least six years.”

  Ruth was on edge. “So?”

  “It’s the solution to your mystery.”

  Scott was distracted, looking for the scrubbing sponge, ready to tackle the burnt lasagna dish.

  “Leave it. I’ll do it in the morning. How does it solve any mystery?”

  He turned around, back against the sink. “Well, in a bunch of ways. It explains why he retired so early, which you seemed to find suspicious. Why he felt bad for your mother, who also had cancer, which explains his generosity.”

  “The timing’s still off,” she said quietly.

  “Whatever the details, he wanted to do a good deed. He saw his own time as limited. He wanted to help. Anyway, the important thing is that he probably won’t volunteer again in the spring. He’s getting weaker, and his life is busy with hospital appointments. I still think the guy’s probably innocent, but either way, it’s reason to stop worrying.”

  “But did you ask John if he’d heard anything about Vorst’s reputation? Any stories about him being inappropriate with kids?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did you talk to the principal?”

  “Of course not.” Scott pulled his chin into his chest. “Ruth. The guy’s got leukemia.”

  “That doesn’t affect what he does with his dick!”

  Scott looked shocked. “I’m not sure why you always think the worst of people.” All the softness in his face, all the normalcy of the previous moment, had evaporated. “Actually, I do. Because you spent years reading and writing and thinking about a woman who was abused as a kid. Thank goodness you’ve had a break from that. I think your brain needs it, so it can heal and begin to perceive the world as a safe, friendly place again.”

  “You said yourself: it isn’t. I thought that was your great epiphany during this false alarm.”

  “For one terrible, sad moment.”

  “Well, take that moment and multiply it by years. That’s how I’ve felt.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  It was the same argument they’d always had.

  “I’ve never wanted to say it, at the risk of making you upset,” Scott said. “But I’m going to say it now.”

  “Please do.”

  “You think something terrible happened to your sister. I completely get how that led to her substance abuse and whatever came after.”

  “Suicide.” She hated when people avoided that word

  “But you’ve always assured me that nothing happened to you. Not directly.”

  “I was just a witness. And a failed one, at that.”

  “Listen. Just because something happened to Annie Oakley, and maybe to your kid sister—and we don’t know half the facts about that—it doesn’t mean everyone is abused as a kid,
or that every coach or teacher is an abuser.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “And here’s the thing about this #MeToo movement. It’s caught a lot of bad guys in its web, but it’s also caught a few innocent ones. Don’t forget that.”

  “Oh, I haven’t forgotten.” Ruth was trying her best not to shut down.

  “I mean, you’re a historian.”

  “I used to be.”

  “So you know better than anyone that where there are misdeeds, there’s got to be ample evidence, right?”

  “One always hopes,” Ruth said. “But then again, one has to remember certain near-universals.”

  “Which are?”

  “Some men get away with assault, rape, even murder. And—statistically speaking—women rarely get even with those men.”

  Scott made a face. “Get even?”

  “Yes, take revenge. Women typically don’t. Statistically speaking.”

  She waited, wanting him to ask, which he never had. If he did, she could spell it out: her darkest revenge fantasy, in enough grim detail that perhaps it would purge the desire to finish what Kennidy had started.

  Awash in his own relentless positivity, he barely knew Ruth, even after all their time together. He didn’t know she hadn’t been a good sister to Kennidy. That she hadn’t wanted to move back home during those final months when Gwen needed her most. He didn’t know the shadows, the rotting corners of her heart, or that her minor acts of bravery—she’d finally driven, to prevent him from driving drunk!—were minor compared to her cowardice. And because he cared for her unquestioningly, blindly, but also shallowly, he could never know her deepest self.