Tell the Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

I glanced over at Toby. He’d fallen asleep on the chaise longue, a field guide to seashells open on his chest. I picked up the white sheet that had been covering the stack of paintings and got up and laid it over him, tucking it in at his chin. I stood there for a minute, watching the sheet move slowly up and down with his breathing. I smiled, because it was the first thing I’d done so far that could maybe count as looking after him, and it felt good to do it. Like maybe I was on the right track.

  After a while I went back to the paintings. Some were so ridiculous I couldn’t help laughing out loud. I think my favorite one was from Arizona, where Toby is this huge saguaro cactus with an owl living right in the middle of him. I started laughing because the whole thing was so, well, silly. That was the only word for it. I must have woken Toby, because the next second he was there, kneeling down on the floor behind me, looking over my shoulder, saying, “I don’t see what’s so humorous,” before bursting out laughing himself.

  “I can’t believe I’ve let you see these, June Elbus.”

  “I can’t either,” I said.

  And then a door slammed somewhere in the basement and we both froze.

  “Shhhh,” Toby said.

  I could hear somebody getting their laundry. A dryer door opening and Toby saying, “Shhh,” again. I flipped to the next painting. There was Toby’s face on a stylized Inuit salmon jumping upstream. British Columbia, it said, and the Toby fish was leaping through the C of Columbia. I let out a wail of laughter and Toby looked down, seeing the exact same thing, and then he started too. We both tried as hard as we could not to laugh, but we couldn’t. I couldn’t.

  “Hey, who’s down here?” an old man’s voice called out from the laundry area.

  Toby pulled me in to him, saying, “Shhh, shhh,” again and again. He wrapped his arms around me and put his broad palm over my mouth, trying to get me to stop laughing. His arms felt stronger than I would have thought. A lot stronger. I stayed there quiet and thought, This is what it felt like to be Finn. This is what it feels like to be held by someone you love. I flipped to the next painting, expecting another postcard, but instead it was Finn. A self-portrait, staring right out at us. There was nothing fancy about it. It was Finn in his blue hat, his blue eyes looking like they were trying to say something without words. The old man kept hollering and Toby’s hand was still over my mouth. I could feel his fingers against my lips, and we weren’t laughing anymore. We were both staring at Finn. “Come on out, goddammit.” And the earthy damp of the basement and Toby’s fingers that felt like lips against mine. And Finn’s eyes, saying, I love you, June. And without thinking, my mouth parted and I felt myself kiss Toby’s fingers. Gentle and soft, eyes closed, imagining everything and nothing, and I could feel Toby’s arms stronger and stronger, his breath in my hair. And then I felt a kiss. A single soft kiss on the back of my neck.

  Over the next few days I went down to see Toby whenever I could. Sometimes I would take the train right after school. Other times I would leave early. I’d cut gym or home ec or sometimes even Spanish if I was feeling bold.

  I think New York was the perfect place for Toby to live because it was maybe the only place he would never run out of new restaurants. With Finn you had places. Horn & Hardart. The Cloisters. Places we went back to so many times that they started to feel like home. Toby was loose. Attached to nothing. Except maybe to Finn. That’s what I started to figure out. Without Finn, Toby was like a kite with nobody holding the string.

  One afternoon Toby tried to teach me how to do the bicycle in the flea circus. After fifteen minutes of trying to make it look like a flea was riding that bicycle, I understood how good Toby was. Sometimes, even close up, it looked to me like there really was something riding that bike. Even standing right next to Toby, I’d get that sensation. My hands moved like they were made of thick clay. And I knew my face gave away everything. Anyone could see I was moving one hand under the stage.

  But Toby wouldn’t give up. He made me try again and again, until by the time I had to go home I was able to make the bike inch around the ring. I knew it looked painful and slow and awful, but Toby was patient and didn’t seem to mind. What I was starting to like about him was that he never lied to me. He never tried to butter me up by pretending I was some kind of budding flea-circus genius. He never said, “Good job,” or “Brilliant,” or any lame, meaningless comments like that. It was never like he was talking to a kid. When he said something I could believe him.

  At the end of that day he said, “Keep trying. I promise you’ll get better.” That’s all he said, but it made me happy because I knew it was exactly what he meant.

  Another time we walked through Central Park and then downtown all the way to Chinatown. Toby talked about playing the guitar, his impossibly long fingers stroking at the air. I told him about the woods and the wolves and jumping rope backward and he didn’t laugh at me at all. We ended up at a place called Cheng Fat Lucky Fortune, where we ordered moo shu vegetables with extra pancakes. Toby ordered a Volcano Bowl, which turned out to be a giant crazy drink that was on fire.

  It came in a huge ceramic bowl with pictures of hula dancers and palm trees on the outside, and there were paper umbrellas and pieces of pineapple and maraschino cherries and big long straws. It was sweet, like coconut and Hawaiian Punch mixed together, and it hardly even tasted like alcohol. We drank and talked and ate, although I noticed it was mostly me eating. Toby only pushed the food around on his plate. That day was the first time I was ever drunk; it made me happy to know that it was a Volcano Bowl that did it. And I suddenly understood that getting drunk was just one more way to leave this place, this time. We stumbled out of Cheng Fat Lucky Fortune, and as my head spun I wondered where Greta went. Deep in the woods, buried in leaves, drunk as can be—how far away did she go?

  Toby put his arm around me to steady me on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. I looked at him through hazy eyes.

  “It’s just us now, isn’t it?” I said. But even as the words were coming out, I knew it wasn’t really true. Finn was always there. Finn would always be there.

  And then I thought something terrible. I thought that if Finn were still alive, Toby and I wouldn’t be friends at all. If Finn hadn’t caught AIDS, I would never even have met Toby. That strange and awful thought swirled around in my buzzy head. Then something else occurred to me. What if it was AIDS that made Finn settle down? What if even before he knew he had it, AIDS was making him slower, pulling him back to his family, making him choose to be my godfather. It was possible that without AIDS I would never have gotten to know Finn or Toby. There would be a big hole filled with nothing in place of all those hours and days I’d spent with them. If I could time-travel, could I be selfless enough to stop Finn from getting AIDS? Even if it meant I would never have him as my friend? I didn’t know. I had no idea how greedy my heart really was.

  I stood there staring at the sky over Canal Street as it faded from orange to a dusty pink. An old lady dragged a shopping cart filled with bags down the street, click click clicking over the sidewalk. The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.

  I looked over at Toby. His eyes were closed and he was smiling like he was remembering the best moment in his life, and all at once I understood that this wouldn’t go on forever. It couldn’t. It wasn’t only that I knew sooner or later I’d get caught for cutting classes. It wasn’t even that tax season was almost over, so I’d have my parents watching everything I did. And it wasn’t that I knew Toby would die. I don’t know how to say it other than to say that the whole thing felt fragile. Like it was made of spun sugar.

  But I didn’t want to think about that. I’d found a friend. And I started to believe that Toby wanted to see me because of me. Not just because of what I knew about Finn. I knew I’d made that mistake before, not understanding who I was with people. With Beans. With Ben. With Finn. Maybe even with Greta. But Toby had nobody
. There didn’t seem any way I could be falling into that same trap again.

  Forty-Five

  My mother rooted around in her purse. It was Thursday morning, before school. It was gray outside, and the top branches of the maple were swaying around in the wind. My father had gone on ahead to the office, but my mother’s first appointment was later so she decided to meet him down there. She was already in her work clothes—one of her navy suits with massive shoulder pads. She moved around the kitchen like it was an alien planet when she was in her work clothes, always standing back from the counter, careful not to brush against anything greasy or wet.

  “You’re buying lunch today, right, June?”

  I usually bought lunch. Pizza. Tater Tots. Soda. All of which were much better than a soggy bologna sandwich in a soggy brown bag. I started to say yes, but then I stopped myself.

  “I don’t know. I was thinking maybe I could have a bagged lunch today. A PBJ or something?”

  It was the thought of my mother’s manicured hand holding the bread, spreading the peanut butter thin and even, spooning on just the right amount of jam. The thought of her cutting my sandwich on the diagonal, then wrapping it neatly in waxed paper. It was the thought of her doing that for me, taking care of me like that, that made me ask.

  My mother clicked her purse shut and looked up at me.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded hard. “Yeah.”

  She put her purse on the counter and started to roll up the sleeves of her jacket. She reached into the cabinet and pulled down the jars. Then she stopped and turned to me.

  “You know, Junie, you’re fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. Here.” She pushed the jar of peanut butter across the counter and rolled her sleeves back down. Even though there wasn’t a crumb on her, she brushed the front of her jacket hard with both hands. I stared at the jar for a few seconds.

  The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have made me that sandwich. If she knew that I’d searched and searched the house until I finally found the little key to the fireproof box buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer, if she knew that I’d unlocked the box and taken my passport out, that I had it with me right that very second in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of my backpack, if she knew why I had it there, if she knew even a bit of all that, she might have made me that PBJ. She wouldn’t have said, “You’re fourteen now,” like she thought I was some kind of responsible adult. No. If she knew about my plan, she would have said, “you’re only fourteen.” She would have told me that I was crazy to think about going to England when I was only fourteen. Crazy to even consider it. And that would be before she knew I’d be going with Toby.

  But she didn’t know any of that. And right then she didn’t want to get her work suit messed up with sticky grape jelly. So instead of making me a sandwich, she made out like fourteen was some kind of turning point in my great journey to becoming a fully grown woman.

  “It’s okay,” I said after a few seconds. “Whatever. I’ll just take the money.”

  My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

  Forty-Six

  “Toby?”

  “June?”

  “Well, um . . . I was just wondering if maybe you’d want to go see The Name of the Rose with me. Sometime. Whenever. You know, if you want.”

  It was the first time I was the one asking Toby to do something. Up until then he was always the one. I’d dropped my backpack on the kitchen floor and called him as soon as I got home. I usually had at least an hour in the empty house, and I dragged the phone into the thin pantry at the side of the kitchen, where there was a stool to sit on.

  I chose The Name of the Rose because it’s about medieval monks in a remote monastery in Italy. It’s a murder mystery and it was supposed to be really good, so I thought Toby would say yes right away, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything for such a long time that I thought something had happened to him.

  “Toby?”

  “I’m not Finn, you know.”

  It was my turn to go quiet. After a while I said, “Yeah, so?” in a sort of duh tone, because I didn’t get his point.

  “Well, I don’t know, I might not like it.”

  I thought about it for a second. “Well,” I said patiently, “I’m not Finn either.”

  “Just, you know, there’ll be no value added. It’ll be like going to a film with any old idiot.”

  “I already knew that,” I said.

  He laughed, but only a little.

  “So, come on. Say yes.”

  He laughed again, but this time it was bigger. More real.

  “Yes. Yes, all right. I’m being stupid.”

  I told him I would make sure not to have any really smart thoughts while we were watching the movie, and then he joked some more about being stupid, and before I knew it we were both cracking up on the phone.

  I said I’d call him soon, when I found out where it was playing. That’s how we left it. I stepped out of the pantry and into the kitchen, holding the phone, my face all hot from laughing, thinking about what a good job I was doing looking after Toby.

  It’s almost slow motion the way I remember it. My arm stretching to hang up the phone. The sound of someone clearing their throat behind me, and me twisting around to look. I can see it frame by frame. My smile disappearing as I saw her, as I took in the whole scene. Greta. Sitting at the kitchen table in her silky Victoria’s Secret pajamas. In front of her, every single thing from the back of my closet. The blue butterfly wrapping paper. The paper bag holding the Requiem tapes. The tapes themselves spilled out over the table. The Elizabethan photo of Toby and me, staring up in those big dumb ruffs. The teapot with the string of a tea bag hanging out. And, worst of all, the notes from Toby, unfolded and obviously read by Greta.

  Greta sat there with no expression on her face.

  “You’re home,” I said, trying for some crazy reason to sound innocent and casual. I realized she must have waited until she heard me come in. She must have been lurking somewhere, waiting for the moment I got home.

  “Sick,” she said. “Stomach flu.” She shook her head back and forth, dragging the whole thing out as painfully as she could.

  “Do you even know how much trouble you’re in?”

  I didn’t move.

  “Do you have any idea how much trouble Toby will be in when Mom and Dad find out that he’s been luring you out to see him?”

  “It’s my business, Greta,” I said, but she just went on.

  “Nobody will care that he’s gay. He’s an adult. That’s all. He’s an adult and you’re a kid, and that’s all anyone will see. He’ll be arrested for being a pervert, and then they’ll find out he gave AIDS to Finn and he’ll go to jail. He. Gave. AIDS. To. Uncle. Finn. Don’t you even care about that? What is wrong with you?”

  What is wrong with me. What is wrong with me?

  “He wasn’t luring me . . .”

  “So it was all your idea, then? This is your boyfriend?” Greta laughed.

  “No. That’s not what I mean. I mean—”

  “I knew you were lying. I knew it,” Greta said, smiling. “As if you actually had a boyfriend. What was I thinking? You are the biggest loser, June.” Her voice was shrill and scary.

  “I . . . He . . .”

  “He what? He’s your new best friend? I heard you on the phone. Laughing your head off. Fawning all over him. As if, June. As if he wants to spend his time on the phone with you.”

  “You don’t know anything about it. You’re so stupid. You’re such a complete idiot.” I wanted to blurt out everything I knew. I wanted to tell her about Finn’s note and how neither of them knew anything about AIDS. How it wasn’t Toby’s fault. But I knew Toby wouldn’t want me to do that. And maybe I was afraid Greta would tell me things I didn’t want to hear. That she would turn the story around until I didn’t know what was true
anymore.

  Greta didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She stared me down, that smile still fixed on her lips. “It’s obvious, June.”

  And before I could stop myself, I played right into her trap. “What’s obvious? What?”

  “You’re just a way to make him feel less guilty. He told you he didn’t, right? That’s what he said? But he knows he gave Finn AIDS, and now he wants a ticket out of the guilt. Why else would he waste his last days on the planet with you?”

  Sometimes what Greta said was so sharp I could actually feel her words cutting up my insides, slicing their way through my stomach and my heart. I knew she’d be looking at me, reading my face, so I tried to harden up as quick as I could. But, still, she’d already seen my reaction.

  “You know it’s true,” she said.

  “You don’t know a thing about us,” I said, but my voice was shaky, unsure.

  She cocked her head and looked at me. “So it’s ‘us,’ now, huh?”

  I knew that when Greta got like this, she would be able to instantly transform whatever I said. It was like she was a master sculptor and my words were the ball of clay in her warm palm. A million possibilities waiting to be formed. I could say anything and Greta would turn it stupid and naïve. But maybe she was right. Maybe it wasn’t that she could change my words; maybe it was that she was able to strip away all the layers until only the truth was left. Ugly and skinless and raw.

  My shoulders slumped, and I thought I might cry in front of Greta for the first time in years. There were all my secrets, spread out on the table. Like someone had taken my insides and scooped them out for everyone to see. Look, here are her stupid hopes! Look, here’s her dumb soft heart!

  But then I watched Greta pick up the teapot and pour tea into her mug. It poured out smooth and neat, and not a single drop spilled. She set the teapot back down on the table, running a finger around the lid before picking up her mug.

  Her hands were on my teapot, my teapot from Finn, and in that moment everything else disappeared. I stared at her finger resting on the spout, and the anger swelled so big in my chest I really thought I could kill Greta right then and there. She blew across the top of her mug, then took a little ladylike sip, and I thought I could punch her again and again. I stepped toward her, then stopped in the middle of the kitchen. Then I screamed as loud as I could. Every mean thing Greta had ever done was wrapped up in that scream. Every snotty remark. Every sneer. Every threat made it louder and louder, until I could see I’d finally scared her.