Tell the Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  The worst thing is the stupid hopefulness. Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance. That I’m going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking, Oh, yeah. This again.

  So I stand on the edge of things, crossing my fingers, praying nobody will try to look me in the eye. And the good thing is, they usually don’t.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, June. I promise it won’t be awful.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. The whole thing sounded too sincere. Not like Greta at all.

  “Really. Cross my heart.” She put both hands over the middle of her chest. I tried hard not to smile, but I could feel my face betraying me.

  “Well, where is it?” I said after a while.

  “Don’t know yet, but Jillian Lampton’s organizing it. You know Jillian Lampton, right?”

  I did know Jillian. She was one of the lighting people for South Pacific. She had dyed black hair that she wore in a sharp bob. I always thought she looked kind of how I’d like to look someday. Jillian was a junior, a class below Greta, but she was probably older than Greta.

  This is something that only a few people know. Greta’s a senior, but she’s only sixteen. None of her friends know her real age. Not a single one. We moved from Queens to our town when I was five and Greta was seven. Greta was supposed to go into second grade, but instead she got put in third. Her last teacher had recommended it. She said Greta wasn’t being challenged and told my parents she could easily hold her own if she skipped a grade. Apparently my father wasn’t sure, but my mother thought it was a fantastic idea. “Opportunities don’t come swimming back to you if you throw them away.” That was her big motto. Mostly for Greta. As if opportunities were slippery little fish. Greta didn’t care either way. So they did it. Even though she was already one of the youngest kids in her class, she skipped a grade. Now she’s at least a year younger than everybody else in her class, almost two years younger than most. But she keeps it quiet. At her birthday parties, my mother would put an extra candle on her cake, just for show. The tradition was that every year Greta would decide which one was the “liar candle” and, if she could, she’d leave that one burning. She was scared that blowing that one out would reverse all her wishes. The age thing is on her school records, but other than that it seems like it’s mostly forgotten. Sometimes I can tell though. I would never say anything to Greta, but sometimes I can see that she’s a lot closer to being a kid than her friends are.

  “I don’t know, Greta. I don’t think Mom—”

  “Don’t worry about Mom. I’ll deal with Mom. It’s a month and a half into tax season. Mom won’t care.” Greta put both hands on her hips and cocked her head to the side. “So you’re coming?”

  “I . . . Why do you want me to?”

  There was a flicker of something in Greta’s look. I couldn’t tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness, and then she said, “Why wouldn’t I want you to?”

  Because you hate me, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

  Three years ago we stopped having Keri Westerveldt babysit us during tax season. Greta was put in charge. My parents trusted her. “You’re both sensible girls,” my mother said. That first year without Keri Westerveldt, Greta kept track of everything I did. She helped me with my homework and sat next to me on the bus on the way home. She made us little American cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches for snacks and we’d sit up in her bedroom eating them, pretending to be the kind of orphans who had only each other in the world. The house would be so still sometimes, so quiet and empty, that it was easy to believe it was true. If she’d asked me to a party back then, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. Even though I hate parties, I would have said yes. I wouldn’t have doubted her at all.

  It’s hard to say exactly when we stopped being best friends, when we stopped even resembling two girls who were sisters. Greta went to high school and I was still in middle school. Greta had new friends and I started having Finn. Greta got prettier and I got . . . weirder. I don’t know. None of those things should have mattered, but I guess they did. I guess they were like water. Soft and harmless until enough time went by. Then all of a sudden you found yourself with the Grand Canyon on your hands.

  “Come on. Please, June?”

  “I don’t know, maybe,” I mumbled. I wanted to believe her intentions were good. I stared right down deep into her eyes, squinting to find the place where all this had come from. But I couldn’t see anything. Then the idea came to me that maybe somehow it was Finn. Maybe when you’re dead you can crawl inside other people and make them nicer than they were before. I don’t really believe in that kind of thing, but I smiled at her anyway. Just in case. Just on the off chance that it was Finn looking out through Greta’s eyes.

  “So you’ll go?” she said.

  I looked around her room. In every corner, clothes lay crumpled and piled. Lipsticks and eyeliners that had rolled to the edge of Greta’s uneven desk rested against a photocopy of the South Pacific script. A crushed 7Up can sat on top of an unsolved Rubik’s Cube. In the upper right-hand corner of her mirror, she’d wedged photo booth pictures of herself and her friends, and I saw my feet sticking out. An old picture of me, of us, my dirty white sandals and the edge of my yellow polka dot sundress peeking out from under all the rest.

  Maybe it was the fact that Greta still kept that picture close at hand, or maybe it was how surprisingly good it felt to have Greta asking me to do something with her, or maybe it was that I knew this was my last real year with her. She’d already gotten early acceptance to Dartmouth. It didn’t seem possible, but in six months she’d be out and gone. It could have been any of those things, or it could have been that the party just felt far away. I knew there’d be time enough to bow out later. Why spoil the moment now? Maybe that’s why I found myself nodding my head.

  “Okay,” I said, half-smiling. “I guess I’ll go.”

  Greta clapped her hands together and did a little hop off the ground. Then she reached over and lifted my braids up onto the top of my head.

  “I’ll fix you all up,” she said. “I still have some Sun-In, and Megan said that it can work even if it’s not summer if you stand really close to a lightbulb. And we can do makeup.” She stopped for a second and let my hair fall back down onto my shoulders. She picked her glasses up off the top of her dresser and put them on. Then she looked at me hard.

  “We’re back, right? Like we used to be? I’ll help you forget all about Uncle Finn. Now that Finn’s gone, you and me . . .” Greta was smiling. Giddy almost.

  I pulled away from her and stared.

  “I don’t want to forget about Finn.”

  That’s what I said. It came straight from my heart and out my mouth, and although it’s as true as anything, I’ve spent a lot of time wishing I hadn’t said it. Wishing I’d told Greta that, yes, we were back. That we were best friends again. That everything could be like it used to be.

  She tried to turn away fast, but before she could, I saw the look of disappointment that flooded across her whole face. She fidgeted with something on her desk, keeping her back to me. When she faced me again, the look was gone, replaced by her usual condescending repulsion.

  “God, June. Do you always have to be such a moron?”

  “I—”

  “Just go. You can go.”

  I got to the door, then turned around.

  “Greta?”

  She let out an annoyed sigh. “What?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  She waved the back of her hand at me.

  “I don’t want to hear it. Just go. Get out.”

  Nine

  Uncle Finn wasn’t just my uncle, he was also my godfather. Greta’s godparents were the Ingrams: Fred Ingram, who was a quality control manager at Pillsbury, and Becca Ingram, his wife. They have one son, named Mikey, who’s younger than me by a couple of years. Greta and
I have known Mikey since the day he was born with that weird portwine-stain birthmark across his shoulder. In the summer, the Ingrams came around a lot for barbecues, and Mr. Ingram always brought his own meat. If we went up to the town pool to swim or had the sprinklers on, Mikey would always wear his T-shirt because of that birthmark. Even in front of Greta and me, who had seen it all before.

  The Ingrams were okay, but you’d never know they were Greta’s godparents. Finn took the job of being my godfather seriously. I asked my mother once why Finn wasn’t Greta’s godfather too, and she said that when Greta was born, Finn hadn’t settled down yet. He was still “out and about,” traveling here and there on a whim. That sounded okay to me, but according to my mother it wouldn’t have been suitable.

  She said that even if Greta had been born after me, she still wouldn’t have asked Finn to be a godfather again because he ended up taking the whole thing to heart too much. She didn’t expect him to take so much interest, and now that I was older she thought it was becoming a distraction. Once, before he died, she said it might be a good thing for me not to be able to rely on him so much.

  I hated that. And I hated when she said any sentence that started with the words “A girl your age . . .”

  I knew Greta hated that I got Uncle Finn and she got stuck with the Ingrams. It wasn’t like Finn ever said Greta couldn’t come along to anything. He never excluded her. She excluded herself. Sometimes she would say, “I don’t want to intrude on your special godfather time with Finn,” in her snotty tone. And I never argued with her because I did want Finn to myself.

  Last summer, Mikey tried to kiss Greta. She told him it was gross because he was her godbrother and that was like incest.

  “But you can kiss June,” she said. Mikey went red, not knowing where to look. Nobody wanted to kiss me, not even Mikey, and Greta wanted to make sure I knew it one more time. But what I could see was that Greta always remembered the godfather thing. It was always right on the edge of her mind. I’d lucked out with Finn, and she knew it.

  Ten

  The portrait finally came out of that ugly black garbage bag on the Tuesday morning after Uncle Finn’s funeral. There was supposed to be only a two-hour delay that morning, but it kept snowing hard and fast, and we ended up getting the whole day off from school. I like snow days. Especially when there was already piles of snow on the ground and you can go out and walk two or three feet above the grass and pretend you’re in a cloud heaven.

  When we were little, before Greta turned mean, the two of us would disappear together into the backyard in our fat snowsuits. We’d lie on our backs, both trying not to blink when the snowflakes hit our faces. Greta said that once a snowflake landed right on her eyeball so that she could see every little delicate detail of it. Every single crystal. Just for a second. Like it was carved right into her eye. She said it was the most beautiful snowflake she could ever imagine. More beautiful even than angels. Then she ran into the house. She clutched at my mother’s skirt, crying and crying because she knew I’d never be able to see that snowflake. She knew she’d never be able to show that perfect thing to me. That’s a story my mother tells sometimes to show what Greta and I used to be like. Sometimes I believe it. Sometimes I don’t.

  “We have to get it framed,” my mother said. My dad had made his way in to the office, but my mother stayed home with us that day. She was pacing the kitchen, holding the bagged painting to her chest. The kitchen smelled of scrambled eggs and coffee, and the snow was coming down so thick I couldn’t even see the car outside in the driveway.

  “We don’t have to,” Greta said. “Who says we have to?”

  “That’s just what you do with a painting,” my mother said. “One of you take it out. Let’s have a look.”

  There was nothing to be afraid of. That’s what I told myself. I reached for the bag. My mother handed it to me, then took a step back. Greta leaned in close as I laid the whole thing down on the table and tugged the bag off.

  There we were, me and Greta, staring up at ourselves from the kitchen table. My hair was the way I always had it—two thin braids, one on each side, tied together at the back—and Greta had her glasses on, because Finn told her he thought we should look the way we always did. That the portrait should be true. The way Finn painted me made it look like I knew some kind of massive secret but I was never going to tell anyone. He should have painted Greta like that, because that’s more what she’s like, but instead he made her look like she’d just finished telling a secret to someone and now she was sitting there, waiting for a reaction. If you look at that portrait you can see what a fantastic painter Finn was. I can’t even begin to understand how he got the thoughts out of someone’s head and onto the surface of a canvas. How can thoughts that are invisible be turned into smudges of red and yellow and white?

  None of us could take our eyes off the portrait. My mother put her arms around our waists and eased in between us. I soaked in every brushstroke, every shading of color, every angle and line in that painting. I could feel my mother and even Greta doing the same. I could feel them wanting to dive into that canvas. My mother’s grip grew tighter and tighter around me until I felt her hand forming a solid fist around my shirt. She twisted her head away and wiped her cheek against the sleeve of her sweater.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  My mother nodded quickly, eyes fixed on the painting. “It’s such a waste. Look at this. Look at what he could do. He had all the opportunities in the world. . . .”

  I thought she was going to cry, but instead she broke the moment with a quick hard clap. Then, in an overly cheerful tone, she said, “Okay. Frames? Ideas?”

  I cocked my head to the side. “Does anyone think it looks . . . I don’t know . . . different?”

  “I don’t know,” Greta said, rubbing her chin, pretending to consider it, “you still look like a doofus.”

  “Not now, Greta,” my mother said, letting out a long slow breath.

  But the painting did look different. The last time I’d seen it was the last time I went to Finn’s. The paint had still been wet, and Finn was there looking smaller than I’d ever seen him before. His vision was going, and he said he’d never be able to get it right. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Sorry, June. Sorry it’s not so great.” He said we’d keep working on it.

  We. That’s what he said. As if I had something to do with it.

  “Everybody finished looking?” my mother asked, reaching for the portrait.

  “Just a sec.” I searched the painting for the thing that had changed. I looked right into my eyes, then Greta’s. No. Nothing was different there. Then I noticed the buttons. There were five buttons right down the front of my T-shirt. Once I saw them, I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen them right away, because they didn’t even look like something Finn would paint. They looked like something a kid might paint. Each one was solid black with a little splotch of white to make it look like light was reflecting off it. Why would Finn put buttons on a T-shirt? I touched my fingertip to the top button. The paint was thicker than it was anywhere else, and somehow that made me sad.

  I looked at my mother and Greta and decided not to mention the buttons.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m done. You can put it away.”

  On Friday after school we went to the frame store downtown. Chubby little Mr. Trusky told us he understood how important it was that we were all happy with the choice, and he let us stay a half hour after he flipped the CLOSED sign on the door. Over and over my mother had Mr. Trusky frame up the portrait, and over and over one of us decided it wasn’t quite right. At the end of that day the painting was still unframed. It went back in the trunk of the car, back in the same black plastic bag we brought it in.

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” my mother said in the parking lot. “He says he’s got more.”

  “Why don’t you just go by yourself?” Greta asked.

  “Absolutely not. This is something Finn made for the two of you. This
is your responsibility.”

  “Well, then, I say we go for the plain black wooden one.”

  I hated the plain black wooden one. It made us look sarcastic.

  Each frame Mr. Trusky put around the portrait seemed to change everything about it. The one my mother liked was called Valencia and was made of dark wood with some small carvings around the edge that looked like coffee beans. I thought it made the whole portrait look boring.

  “I like the gold one. The old-fashioned one.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Greta said.

  It was called Tuscan Gold, and I thought it looked classy. Like the painting could go right into a museum with that frame around it.

  “Finn would like that one,” I said.

  “How do you know what Finn would like?” Greta asked, her voice sharp. “Have you managed to jump rope your way to the land of the dead now?”

  Sometimes it amazed me the way Greta remembered things. When I was nine I had an idea about time travel. I thought that maybe if I jumped rope backward fast enough, I would go back in time. If I could just churn the air hard enough around me, I could make a little bubble that went backward. I didn’t believe that anymore. I didn’t believe anyone could have that kind of power.

  My mother looked like she might break down any second, so I nudged Greta.

  “Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow we’ll see things clearer,” my mother said.

  And somehow we did. We chose the first one Mr. Trusky showed us the next morning. Maybe we chose fast because Greta had found a good excuse not to come with us, so it was only me and my mom. Or maybe it was because we were worn down or maybe because it really was the best frame. It was medium brown with beveled edges, and it almost seemed to disappear around the canvas, letting the painting be itself.