Tell the Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “I’ve never seen you in it.”

  Toby gave me a look that said there was a good reason for that, but then he slipped the shirt over his head without bothering to undo the buttons. I’d brought him a regular pair of jeans, which he seemed relieved to see. I turned my head away as he slid out of the hospital gown. When I turned back he was still sitting on the edge of the bed and he’d changed into the jeans, but he was hunched over, like just changing clothes had exhausted him. I sat next to him on the bed and leaned my head over so I could press my ear to his chest. There was so much rasping and wheezing it was hard to see how he was getting any air at all. Then I remembered the oxygen tank, and I reached across the bed, grabbed the mask, and passed it to Toby.

  He nodded and pressed it over his nose and mouth. A look of relief spread across his face.

  I followed the tube from the mask, hoping it would lead to some kind of little tank I could pick up. Instead the tube connected to a pipe that ran right along the wall and seemed to be connected to the building itself.

  “We won’t be able to take this,” I said. “Maybe it’s a dumb idea.”

  Toby moved the mask away from his face and shook his head. “No, it’ll be all right. We’ll be in the fresh air.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, but in my heart I knew he was making a choice. I knew what it meant.

  “Toby?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “You . . . You don’t mean Finn was your first love ever. You don’t mean real first, right?” I turned away, embarrassed to be asking. But I needed to know.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. I sat there listening to his wheezy breathing, thinking it was probably wrong to ask a question like that. That maybe sometimes what’s private should stay private. I was about to tell him to forget it, but then he picked up my hand in his and spoke in a small thin voice.

  “Finn never knew. It’s just between you and me now, all right? It doesn’t matter. It’s nobody’s fault.”

  I felt his fingers squeeze my palm, and it was like he was pressing this secret into my hand. Suddenly all the smells in that room—rubbing alcohol and pine disinfectant and raspberry Jell-O—grew harsher and brighter. Like they were trying to obliterate this revelation that changed everything and nothing at all. Toby had closed his eyes, but mine were wide open and I couldn’t stop staring at him. This is what love looks like, I thought. Then I squeezed his hand back.

  “It’s safe with me,” I said. “I promise.”

  With his eyes still closed, he smiled. “I know.”

  I was right about Bellevue. It was the kind of place you could walk right out of without anyone noticing at all. I took a blanket from Toby’s bed and a wheelchair from near the nurse’s station and wheeled Toby into the elevator. A few nurses glanced at us, but they all seemed too busy to care. I left him in the lobby, then went out to hail a taxi. It didn’t take long. I told the taxi driver to wait, then I ran back in for Toby.

  When we got out there, the taxi driver stared at the two of us, and I could see he was trying to figure out who we were to each other. I thought of Playland, of how the woman there thought we were some kind of weird couple. I knew there was no way anyone could come to that conclusion now. No way at all. And maybe it was some of Toby’s mischievousness rubbing off on me, or maybe it was just that I wanted to test the word on my lips—I wanted to see if my lips could hold such a huge and powerful word—but I looked that driver straight in the eye and leaned in and said, “Excuse me, but would you mind helping my lover into the car?” It was the first time all night that Toby laughed. He turned his head away, trying to keep up the game. The driver’s mouth actually hung open, like a dumb guy in a cartoon, but I kept my eyes on him, like I didn’t understand what the problem was. I let the word lover hang in his mind until finally he gave a little lift of his hand, as if to say, “Whatever,” or “Only in New York,” or “To each his own.” The kinds of things people say about things they know they’ll never understand. Then he reached for Toby’s arm and eased him into the backseat of the cab.

  “So where to?” the driver said.

  I gave him my address. Not the apartment, but my real address at home.

  “But—” Toby began.

  “It’s okay.”

  “You have the money to go all the way up to Westchester?” the driver said. “I’m gonna need a deposit.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a wad of the bills that Toby had given me all that time ago. “Here,” I said handing him two fifties.

  “Okay, okay. No questions asked,” he said, as he pulled away from the curb. He looked over his shoulder at us. “You two mind some music?”

  Toby smiled. “Music, yes, music,” he mumbled. The driver fumbled around with the radio dial, and a few seconds later he caught the NYU station and someone was saying, “. . . and now for Frankie Yankovic and the ‘Tick Tock Polka.’” The taxi filled with Frankie and his accordion and this silly, silly polka, and I looked at Toby and he looked at me and we laughed so hard it hurt.

  And that’s when I finally gave away one of my Finn stories to Toby. It was just a small story, like all my stories were. I told him about that day Greta brought the mistletoe with her to Finn’s apartment. I whispered the story into his ear. I told him about the weather that day. The pellets of sleet as we drove down. The way Finn looked. What he was wearing. I wasn’t even sure Toby could hear me, but I told him about the Requiem on the stereo. How the portrait was almost done. How scared I was. How stupid. And how, in the end, none of that mattered, because Finn saw through it all. I told Toby about Finn’s soft butterfly kiss on the top of my head. How he saw exactly what I was feeling and made it all right. Like he always did.

  Toby leaned on my shoulder and I felt him nodding just a little bit. He wasn’t coughing much anymore, but his breathing had turned thick and gurgly. Like he was breathing water instead of air.

  I would have ridden around like that for hours and hours. Maybe weeks, months. Maybe the rest of my life. The taxi took us out of the city, all the way up First Avenue and across the Willis Avenue Bridge, past Yankee Stadium, then away from the brightly lit streets and out, out onto the dark highway. Window open. Cool night air pushing in at us, and the radio buzzing out polkas about clocks, and beer, and yellow roses, and blue eyes crying. There was Toby’s drowsy head on my shoulder and my open hand on his head, and the rough wool blanket that covered both of us, and the feeling of having laughed and laughed and cried until there was nothing left at all. But stillness. The best kind of stillness. That’s how I remember that night. That’s how I want always to remember it.

  Sixty-Five

  Toby was right. Finn was my first love. But Toby, he was my second. And the sadness in that stretched like a thin cold river down the length of my whole life. My signature would probably set, and tax seasons would come and go. I’d eventually tuck the medieval boots way in the back of my closet and start wearing sneakers and jeans like everyone else. Maybe I’d grow some more, or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d become the Wolf Queen of the outer regions, or maybe I’d just stay June Elbus, Queen of Jealous Hearts. Maybe I’d spend my years alone, waiting for someone to come along who was even half as good as Toby or Finn. Even a quarter as good. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I already knew there was no point waiting for that. Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.

  But then, I guess it’s what I deserve. No. That would be kind. I deserve much worse.

  Toby slept on the couch in our living room. The painted Greta and the painted me and the real Greta and the real me all watched over him through the night. He slept covered in all the blankets from our beds, blankets printed with rainbows and balloons and Holly Hobby in her big straw ribbon-tied bonnet. He slept with our eyes on h
im.

  Greta had waited up for me. She didn’t say anything when she saw I had Toby; she gave me a graceful nod so I’d know she understood. Mostly we sat silent, but every once in a while Greta would sing snatches of whatever she could think of, and every time she did we saw a little smile pull at the corner of Toby’s mouth. So she kept going. Songs from South Pacific and James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel. We were careful to keep our voices low, and other than Greta’s soft, sweet singing, we hardly said anything. I sat on a chair next to the couch and kept my hand on Toby’s fevered head. Just like he probably did for Finn.

  And then the world started to wake up. At the first sign of light, Greta pulled the curtains closed so tight that not a crack of brightness could leak in. But even without light, the day was starting. Car doors slammed. The grind of tires on gravel driveways. My parents’ radio alarm clock, the serious voice of 1010 WINS. All news. All the time. The bathroom door closing, then opening again, and then slippered footsteps padding down the stairs.

  “Let me—” Greta said.

  “No.” I shook my head, then scooted my chair even closer to Toby. I wanted everything to be plain and true. I wanted my mother to come down and see my hand on Toby’s head.

  And she did. She stood on the stairs in her bathrobe, squinting into the dim living room. “June?” she said. But that was all she got out, because as she looked from me to Toby to Greta, there was nothing else to say. The whole story was there. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth and then she turned back up the stairs to get my father.

  There was a lot of talking after that. Some of it was angry, hurt. But mostly there were just questions, and by the end of it all, there was nothing left to say. Both of them understood that Toby had been my friend.

  For a long time, the four of us sat in the living room in the kind of brittle silence I’d only ever felt in churches and libraries. The kind everyone is careful not to break. We watched Toby’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, the only proof that he was still with us.

  It was my mother who stood first. She walked across the room, knelt on the floor next to Toby, and laid her open palm on his head. I watched as she ran her hand over his soft feathery hair, and even though her back was to me, I think I heard her say, “Sorry.” I want to believe that’s what I heard. I needed to know that my mother understood that her hand was in this too. That all the jealousy and envy and shame we carried was our own kind of sickness. As much a disease as Toby and Finn’s AIDS.

  In the end it was just the two of us in the room. My mother and me. Toby’s body stilled, and she reached out and laid her hand on my shoulder. That was how one person’s story ended.

  Later that night, long after Toby’s body had been taken away and everyone was fast asleep, I saw something I mentioned only to Greta. I couldn’t sleep and so I crept downstairs. The living room was dark except for a single lamp on a table near the mantel. A dining-room chair had been dragged over next to the fireplace, and standing on it was my mother. She had a thin paintbrush in one hand and in the other was a plastic ice cream lid that she was using as a palette. I watched quietly, just out of sight, as she delicately dipped the brush into the paint. I saw her tilt her head and eye the portrait before she touched her brush to the canvas, just like Finn. I stood there in complete disbelief as I watched my mother make her own small strokes on the painting. In the morning I woke before anyone else to see what she’d done. Around my neck was an intricate, perfectly painted silver necklace. On Greta’s finger was a silver ring set with her birthstone.

  Sometimes I tell myself that it wasn’t so bad. Being responsible for killing someone who was dying anyway. Murdering a person who was already almost dead. That’s what I try to think sometimes, but it never works. Two months is sixty days, 1,440 hours, 86,400 minutes. I was a stealer of minutes. I stole them from Toby and I stole them from myself. That’s what it came down to. My family would go on forever thinking Toby was a murderer, but they’d never know about me. They’d never guess that there was a real killer living right in their house. It doesn’t matter that Toby forgave me. That he really truly left this world with not a single bad feeling for me. That we ended as the sweetest of friends. None of that changed anything. There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I’ll carry them for the rest of my days.

  But there is another place in my heart that knows that I finally kept my promise. I was the one who took care of Toby right up to the very end, who stayed with him so he wouldn’t be alone. Just like Finn would have wanted. And sometimes, when I don’t want to be sad anymore, I think that makes it almost even.

  One thing I do know is that my superpower is gone. My heart is broken and soft, and I am plain again. I have no friends in the city. Not a single one. I used to think maybe I wanted to become a falconer, and now I’m sure of it, because I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

  Finn set it up so when Toby died, Greta and I would get everything. Even the apartment. Sometimes I imagined our lives in the future. Both of us shooting out in different directions. College and husbands and kids. Maybe we would live thousands of miles apart. In separate countries. Separate continents, even. I imagined even further on, when we were old ladies. Stooped-over old grannies with great big handbags and glasses and hand-knitted shawls. I imagined us all those years in the future, coming back to Finn’s apartment. Our secret place. The place Finn and Toby left just for us.

  But that room in the basement, that small magical place, that will always be mine alone. I found Toby’s copy of the silly picture of him and me at Playland and I had it framed. I used some wire to hang it on the wall of the lockup. That’s the only time I’ve been back there. I took the elevator down and I wasn’t scared at all. Not even a little bit. Toby told me once that when he and Finn first found out they had AIDS, instead of feeling damaged and like time was running out, they felt just the opposite. He and Finn felt all-powerful. Like nothing could touch them. Maybe I’d caught some of that, because walking across that basement, past all those creepy mattresses and dark dead ends, all I felt was strong and hard. Like I wanted to shout out, “Come and get me.” Knowing that nothing could.

  There wasn’t a funeral for Toby. And he didn’t want to be buried. He’d told me that once, joking around. “I don’t see myself as a grave kind of bloke,” he said. And I probably told him that I didn’t see him as an ash kind of bloke either. Something like that. I don’t remember exactly.

  All along I’d wondered where Finn’s ashes were, and after the hundredth time I asked, my mother finally admitted that she had them. They were in a beautiful polished wood urn that she’d put on the very top shelf of her closet. I imagined her taking that urn out late at night. I imagined her running her palm over the smooth curve of it. I imagined her saying how sorry she was for how unkind she’d been to Toby. Sorry for how everything had turned out. I imagined those things because I needed to. I needed to think everything she’d done was out of love. Because I could understand that. I could forgive it. It made me think that maybe one day I might be able to forgive myself.

  Instead of having a real funeral, Toby was cremated, and finally I thought I had a plan. I wanted to give Toby back to Finn. I wanted the crematorium to open Finn’s urn and put Toby’s ashes in there with his. I expected my mother to argue about it, but she didn’t. She said she thought I was right. That it was the least we could do. The least we both could do. And after it was done, I felt that for once I’d gotten something completely right.

  When I go to the woods now, I always head out along the brook and go straight to the big maple. I run there, like Toby must have done on that stormy night, then I bend down and crawl on the earth. Because what if there’s a clue? What if there’s a piece of chunky strawberry bubble gum still bundled up in its waxy wrapper, or a weather-faded matchbook, or a fallen button from somebody’s big gray coat? What if buried under all those leaves is me? Not this me, but the girl in a Gu
nne Sax dress with the back zipper open. The girl with the best boots in the world. What if she’s under there? What if she’s crying? Because she will be, if I find her. Her tears tell the story of what she knows. That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there’s nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home.

  Sixty-Six

  We were all sitting in the living room when the doorbell rang. It was a Saturday morning and we were expecting him, the man from the Whitney. My mother stood and looked at all of us.

  “I don’t want a scene,” she said, turning to stare right at me.

  “What?” I said with my best “I would never do that” look.

  “No inappropriate comments and no scenes, got it? This whole thing is embarrassing enough.”

  I did agree with her on that. It had been embarrassing. Only my mother, Greta, and I were home when the man from the Whitney had come to see the portrait the first time. I think we were all expecting some nice laid-back art person, but he seemed more like someone from the army than someone involved with art. He had a crew cut and wore a white shirt buttoned right up to the top. He carried a black briefcase and like my mother predicted, he thought we were nuts. He told us that he was appalled by what we’d done. He said it three or four times with a deep frown on his face. I could tell that even my mother was intimidated by him, because she forgot to offer him coffee, and she never forgot to be polite. We sat there in the living room while he stared at the portrait. He pulled a clipboard with a yellow legal pad out of his briefcase, and he jotted down a few notes as he analyzed it. Every now and then he took a few steps closer, then back, then left and right, scribbling on the pad all the time.

  I wasn’t sure if he understood that Greta and I were the ones he was looking at, that we were right there behind him. I wasn’t about to point it out to him, but the longer he stared, the more angry I started to feel about it. How dare he look at us like that? What right did he have to tear us apart with his eyes? All those hours Finn spent trying to get us just right. Because he loved us. Because he wanted to do this thing for us. All that love didn’t mean anything to this Whitney guy. That was obvious. He looked at us like we were specimens. He stared and stared, and suddenly all I wanted to do was protect us. And Finn. I wanted to protect Finn’s work.