Tell the Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “Leave it with me for a couple days. I’ll have it all framed up by, say, Tuesday morning.” Mr. Trusky scribbled on a pad.

  “Leave it?” I said.

  My mother put a hand on my shoulder. “He can’t do it right now, honey. It takes some time.”

  “But I don’t like the idea of leaving it here. Away from us.”

  “Come on, now, don’t be rude. Mr. Trusky’s doing his very best.” My mother smiled at Mr. Trusky, but he was still writing on his pad.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll come in special tomorrow afternoon, just for you, and I’ll bring it over to your house when I’m done with it. Okay?”

  I nodded. It would still be away overnight, but it seemed like the best deal I was going to get.

  “Say thank you to Mr. Trusky, please, June. This is awfully nice of him.”

  I thanked him and we left. Mr. Trusky kept his promise, and the painting came back to us the next day. He propped it up on the kitchen counter so we could have a good look.

  “Now, that’s one handsome piece of art,” my father said, hands on his hips.

  “And the frame is perfect. We do appreciate everything you’ve done,” my mother said.

  “It makes all the difference, you know,” Mr. Trusky said.

  Both my parents nodded, though I’m not sure they were even listening.

  “And what about you, June? Are you happy?” Mr. Trusky asked.

  It was the kind of question you had to say yes to. But really I wasn’t. All I could see was me and Greta shoved into that frame together. No matter what happened, the two of us would always be trapped inside those four pieces of wood.

  Eleven

  “Can you sign for it . . .” The mailman pointed at a line halfway down a paper on his clipboard. His cap was tipped down with the peak covering his eyes. He scanned the list of names. “. . . June. June Elbus.”

  This was on an afternoon a couple of weeks after Finn’s funeral, when I was the only one home. I nodded and took the pen from his hand, which was shaking a little. As I signed my name, I could see out of the corner of my eye that the mailman was peeking into the house. After I signed, he handed me a box.

  “Thanks,” I said, glancing up at him.

  He stared back at me, and for a moment it seemed like he wanted to say something to me. Then he smiled and said, “Yeah. Right. It’s fine . . . June.”

  He turned to go, but then he stopped and stood there for another moment, his back to me.

  I started easing the door closed, but the mailman still stood there, not moving. For a second it looked like he was about to turn around. He put a finger up in the air like he was about to say something, but then he didn’t. He just let his hand drop and walked away.

  I went straight up to my room and scooted onto my bed. I sat cross-legged with the package on my lap. The box was entirely covered in tape. It was like someone had taken a roll of brown packing tape and wrapped it around and around in every direction until the box completely disappeared. I tried to find an end to pull, but I couldn’t, so I used scissors to cut through the top. It wasn’t my birthday and it was two months past Christmas. There was no return address on that box. Nothing at all except my name and address written in black permanent marker on top of the tape.

  Inside were two big overpacked blobs, one smaller than the other. I opened the smaller one first. As I got down to the last few layers of bubble wrap and newspaper, I started to feel what it was. Then I saw a flash of brilliant blue with gold and red, and I realized that it was the lid of Finn’s Russian teapot. I almost dropped it right onto the floor. After all that careful packaging, I almost let it slip right out of my fingers. I quickly moved on to the bigger piece. Ripping at it. Desperate to see the whole pot again.

  The last time I’d seen that teapot was that last Sunday we went to Finn’s. That Sunday when Greta didn’t want to come along. That day, my mother and Finn were arguing about the pot. He wanted her to take it but she wouldn’t. He held it out to her with two hands, and she batted him away.

  “Stop being like that. We’ll see you again,” she said.

  Finn gave me a look like he was checking to see if it was okay to tell the truth. I looked away. I wanted to go into another room, but Finn had a one-bedroom apartment and there was nowhere else to go except the tiny kitchen, which was behind two swinging doors like they had in the Old West.

  “Danni, just take it. For June. Just let me have my way for once.”

  “Ha. For once. That’s a good one.” My mother’s voice was shrill. “We don’t need your teapot and that’s that.”

  He walked across the room toward me, with the pot cradled in his hands.

  My mother gave me a look. “Don’t you even think about it, Junie.”

  I sat there frozen. My mother headed Finn off, grabbing at the pot. Finn held it up over his head, trying to hand it to me.

  Right then I thought I could see into the future of that teapot. I could see it smashing against the wood floor of Finn’s living room. I could see all those shiny colored pieces catching the light of the sunset through Finn’s big windows. I saw half a dancing bear, a bear with no head, just legs, kicking up toward the ceiling.

  “You silly old woman,” Finn said. He always called my mother “old woman.” Since they were kids, she told me once. And they had other jokes between them. Finn would call her “mutton dressed as lamb,” which wasn’t really true, and then she’d call him “lamb dressed as mutton,” which was true. Finn did dress like an old man, with brown-buttoned cardigan sweaters and big, clunky old man shoes and handkerchiefs in his pockets. But it looked good on him. It looked right.

  “You silly, silly old woman.”

  My mother stopped reaching for the pot. She smiled the tiniest little smile.

  “Maybe,” she said, her whole body drooping. “Maybe that’s what I am.”

  Finn lowered the pot and took it back to the kitchen. He was so pale that the colors of the pot looked garish next to him. I would have liked to have taken it from him. It didn’t have to mean anything. It didn’t have to mean we wouldn’t see him again.

  “June,” Finn called from the kitchen in his hoarse, worn-down voice. “Can you come here a sec?”

  When I got in there, he hugged me. Then he whispered in my ear. “You know that pot’s for you. No matter what, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “And promise me you’ll only serve the best people from it.” His voice was cracking, splintering up. “Only the very best, okay?” His cheek was wet against mine, and I nodded without looking at him.

  I promised. Then he squeezed my hand and pulled away from me and smiled.

  “That’s what I want for you,” he said. “I want you to know only the very best people.”

  That’s when I broke down and cried, because I already knew the very best people. Finn was the very best person I knew.

  That was the last time I saw that teapot at Finn’s house. The last time I ever thought I would see it. Until the day it showed up on my doorstep.

  I ripped open the rest of the packaging, then stood the teapot on my dresser. It was exactly the same. I picked the lid up from my bed and went to put it on the pot. That’s when I saw there was something inside. At first it looked like just a scrap of the packing paper, but it was folded too neatly. Then I saw my name on it. For June. A note? Maybe from Finn? A rush of joy and fear rose up in my chest.

  I rewrapped the pot with all the bubble wrap, but I kept the note out. I settled the teapot into the box and looked at it again. No return address and no stamps. How could there be no stamps? For a second I had the stupid thought that maybe the ghost of Finn had brought me the teapot. But then the mailman came back into my head. When I thought about it, it hit me that there was nothing official at all about what he was wearing. A navy blue baseball cap and a navy jacket? My parents would have killed me for opening the door. But there was something more than that. Something about the way he’d looked at me. What was it? Why was
there something familiar? And then it clicked. It was the guy from the funeral. The guy who Greta said was a murderer. A chill shimmied through my body. He’d come right up to my front door.

  I grabbed the note off my bed and slid the box to the very back of my closet. I vaulted down the stairs and grabbed my coat. I stuck the note in my coat pocket and then, even though it was getting dark, I left for the woods.

  Twelve

  26th February, 1987

  Dear June,

  My name is Toby. I was a very close friend of your uncle Finn, and I was wondering if it might be at all possible for us to meet up. I think you might know who I am because we spoke once on the telephone. I sincerely apologize if I distressed you on that occasion. Also, I know you saw me at the funeral. I was the man nobody wanted to see.

  Please don’t take this the wrong way or be afraid, but I would advise you not to tell your parents about this letter, or even your sister, as I think you know how they might react. I think you are perhaps the only person who misses Finn as much as I do, and I think just one meeting might be beneficial to us both.

  This is what I suggest: I will be at your train station at 3:30 P.M. on Friday 6th of March. If you meet me there, we can ride the train somewhere. Talk in peace. Would that be all right?

  I don’t know what you’ve been told about me, but it’s probably not true.

  With much hope of seeing you soon,

  Toby

  That’s what the letter said. I had to read it sitting on the curb under a streetlamp in the school parking lot, because it was too dark in the woods by the time I got there. A few kids from the play were out there waiting for their mothers to drop off dinner. I stayed in the far corner of the lot with my hood up over my head, hoping nobody would see me.

  Once I’d read the letter, I shoved it back into my pocket and walked right into those dusky woods. It was wet and icy, but I didn’t care. I walked and walked until I got to the brook. All along the edge of the water there were paper-thin sheets of ice pressed with brown leaves. But the middle still ran, quick and snaky, like it was worried it might get caught. I jumped across the brook and walked a bit farther before I sat down on a big wet boulder. I must have gone farther than I thought, because I could hear the same sad howling I’d heard the last time I was in the woods. Or maybe it wasn’t that I’d gone farther; maybe those wolves, or whatever they were, were coming closer. I unfolded the note and tried to read it again. I sat there squinting my eyes to see the words one more time, but I couldn’t. Even with no leaves, the trees shaded out any light that was left.

  But it didn’t matter. I didn’t need light. The words of that note were already burned into my mind. You are perhaps the only person who misses Finn as much as I do. What was that supposed to mean? What was it supposed to mean that some man who thought it was a good idea to pretend to be a mailman and show up on the doorstep of his boyfriend’s niece’s house thought he missed Finn, my uncle Finn, as much as I did? This man who’d killed Finn. I could have shouted out right along with those wolves. I could have let a warm howl turn my breath into a ghost in those cold winter woods. But I didn’t. I sat there, quiet.

  I thought about tearing that note up into a thousand little pieces. I thought about dropping the pieces into the fast, cold brook and watching them float away. But I didn’t. I folded it up into a thick small square, tucked it back into my pocket, and turned for home.

  Thirteen

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s gonna happen to Finn’s apartment?”

  It was later that same night. I’d waited until Greta was in bed. My dad was watching the late news, and my mother was washing out the crockpot in the kitchen. She had on her yellow rubber gloves, and her shoulders shook with the effort of scrubbing. You could tell how far into tax season it was by what my mother did at night. Now she was still doing dishes before going to bed. By mid-March, the crockpot would sit soaking overnight in the sink and she’d be on the couch with my father, both of them with eyes barely open, folders of paperwork on their laps.

  When she heard my question, she stopped scrubbing and stood staring out the dark kitchen window for a few seconds. Then she pulled off the gloves one at a time and tossed them into the sink. When she turned around she was frowning a little, but I could see she was trying not to.

  “Let’s sit down.” She pointed down the hall, toward the living room. “Go on. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The folded note was still in my pocket and I slid my hand in there, letting my fingers riffle the edges. I looked at my mother, thinking she had no idea what I was holding on to, thinking I would tell her when the right moment came along.

  In the living room, the portrait’s eyes were on me. We’d hung it just a few hours after Mr. Trusky dropped it off. At first my mother said it should go in our rooms. Greta’s for a month, then mine for a month, switching back and forth like that. Finn meant it for us, she said. Greta said right away that she didn’t want it in her room. It creeped her out and she didn’t like the way Finn had painted her. She said he’d purposely made her look like an idiot. And, she said, she didn’t like the way he’d painted me either.

  “Why not?” I said. “I think it looks okay.”

  “Of course you think it looks okay. He made you look better than you’ve ever looked in your whole life. You would like it.”

  She was right. I did like myself in that portrait. There was a kind of intelligence in my eyes that I was pretty sure wasn’t there in real life, and I seemed smaller. Greta and Finn and my mother all had the same slim bones. My father and I were the lumbering ones, the misshapen bears. But in the portrait, Greta and I were almost the same size.

  Still, if you looked at Greta and looked at the portrait, you could see that Greta was prettier in real life and prettier in the picture, and I told her that.

  “I’m not prettier, you dweeb. I’m just older. Can’t you even tell the difference?”

  It was a nice thing for her to say. In her way. With Greta you have to look out for the nice things buried in the rest of her mean stuff. Greta’s talk is like a geode. Ugly as anything on the outside and for the most part the same on the inside, but every once in a while there’s something that shines through.

  “Well, then, I’m going to be selfish,” my mother said. “I don’t think it’s fair that the painting stays locked up in one person’s room forever, so I’m going to suggest that we hang it over the mantel. Any problems with that?”

  Greta groaned. “That’s even worse. It’ll creep out the whole living room. Plus, absolutely everyone who comes here will see the thing.”

  “I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to be, Greta. June, any problem with that?”

  “No. That’s okay.”

  “That’s done, then. We’ll have your father hang it.”

  Since it’s been up, I’ve caught my mother staring at it. Not just once, but a bunch of times. All that time at Finn’s it was like she was completely uninterested, almost repulsed, by the portrait, but since it’s been in our house she’s seemed almost obsessed with it. I’ve seen her eyeing it the same way Finn did. Tilting her head. Muttering things to it under her breath. Walking close, then backing up. This was usually at night, after I was supposed to be in bed, and if she caught me standing there she’d give me an embarrassed smile. Then she’d walk out of the room, acting like nothing had been going on.

  I’d made sure that Greta wasn’t around when I asked about the apartment. I thought she probably knew all the horrible details of what was going to happen to it. She probably knew that it’d be scrubbed with bleach until there wasn’t even a hint of lavender or orange left. She probably knew exactly who the new owners would be and that they were horrible people who’d turn that apartment into some kind of dumpy place with TVs and stereos and wires all over the place. Finn hated wires. He hated having stuff plugged in everywhere.

  At first, when my mother came into the living room, she didn’t say any
thing. She looked up at the portrait, then she looked at me. She sat next to me on the couch, close, with her arm around my shoulders. She smelled of lemony dish soap.

  “Junie,” she said. “You need to understand some things about Finn.” She turned her face away from me, then turned back. “I know how much you loved your uncle. And I did too. He was my baby brother. I loved him to pieces.”

  “Love.”

  “What?”

  “Love, not loved. We can still love him.”

  My mother raised her head.

  “Of course we can. You’re right. But the thing about Finn is that he didn’t always make the best choices. He did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He didn’t always . . .”

  “Care what other people wanted him to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t care what you wanted him to do.”

  “That’s not the important thing. The important thing to understand is that Finn was a free spirit and a good man, but maybe sometimes he was a bit too trusting.”

  My mother said this kind of thing about Finn a lot. How he never grew up. She said it like it was a bad thing, but to me it was one of the very best things about him.

  “So what does this have to do with his apartment?”

  “Nothing. Just, well, Finn had a different . . . lifestyle. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I know Finn was gay, Mom. Everybody knows that.”

  “Of course you do. Of course. So let’s just leave it there. Okay? We don’t need to worry about the apartment anymore.” My mother rubbed my back and smiled. She started to stand, but I wasn’t done.

  “Well, what if I wanted to go there?”

  My mother shook her head, then stared up at the portrait for a long time. When she finally looked at me again, her face was serious.