A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  Chapter 16

  Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 27 days

  Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 27 days

  Homeward has restarted.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. From the bubble of my car, I look at the forest. I try to care when my phone beeps with road closures and alerts about the impending superstorm that might hamper my return to the city.

  I can’t say—I won’t say—my return home.

  My hand is still holding the car door. I need to let go. I need to start the engine. I need to put the damn thing in Reverse. My mind rehearses the procession of towns and landmarks that will mark my return Offland—Dannemora. Plattsburgh. Ausable Chasm. Schroon Lake. I can’t do this again. Saratoga, Albany, Hudson.

  My single eye falls to the bag on the floor and the little box sitting on top. Suddenly, the tires graunch against the loose stones as I throw the car into Reverse and bump down the road away from Homelands, aiming for another wilderness, the one north of Desolation Lake and west of Hope.

  Feeling quickly in the underside of my visor, I find the card from the president of the New York State Sheriffs’ Association that has his personal cell scrawled on the back. Then I race toward the same coordinates that I loaded into my phone on that earlier visit.

  When I pull up beside Thea’s Jeep, she’s already at her door, alerted by the crunch of rocks and thunk of my wheels. Standing with her hands flat in the back pockets of her jeans, she looks through the windshield. I clutch the steering wheel, suddenly wondering what I’m doing here.

  I keep looking straight ahead when she comes around to the side and opens the door, taking me in: mauled face, purple travesty of a sweatshirt leaking blood, the short sweatpants and flip-flops.

  Thea stands back, pulling the door open wide. “You’d better come inside.”

  I clamber out. The snow has already started, and its incongruous flakes cover my flip-flops.

  Thea pulls at my arm. “Come on,” she says, pushing and pulling me toward her cabin.

  As soon as the door closes, I collapse against it. “I had an accident,” I start. “A deer crossed the road—”

  “If you don’t want to tell me, don’t, but please don’t lie.”

  I watch her move quickly and quietly around the cabin. She puts a pot of water on the stove.

  “Let’s get you fixed up,” she says, heading into the little bathroom. “Watch your head.”

  On the edge of the bathtub, I unzip the hoodie and start to shrug it off, opening up the claw marks that start at my rib cage and keep going below my waistband.

  Thea purses her lips and releases them with a pop.

  She hands me a small towel. “Take off your pants and”—she looks at the navy-blue flip-flops—“shoes. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The gray sweats fall to my naked feet. My body is covered with mud, and when I touch my hair, there are burrs in it. I stretch the hand towel across my front and start to pick them out.

  “I got into a fight,” I say when she returns with a bucket and a big first aid box.

  “Hmm-hmm.” She drops my filthy clothes in the corner, then reaches past me to turn on the water. When it’s warm enough, she fills the bucket, then motions me in. It’s tight in here, much smaller than the bathroom in the apartment. There’s barely enough space for me to turn, and the water from the showerhead only hits my shoulder blades.

  “Put your head back.”

  I tense immediately, my muscles coiled. I have to remind myself that she isn’t Pack and has no idea what it means for a wolf to expose his throat. She has no idea that it’s what we do when we don’t have words and need to say I am vulnerable, but I trust you.

  How did I end up here? Battered and exhausted and looking for help in this little cabin from this little human with her little bucket and her ironwood eyes?

  I ended up here because there’s something about her that I do trust. Her edges aren’t smoothed down and polite. She isn’t all about compromise and accommodation. Maybe I trust because I know that to be honest with someone else, you have to be honest with yourself, and I believe Thea is. Honest. With herself.

  I close my eyes and lean my head back, my neck stretched out long. The ladle clunks in the bucket. An audible sigh escapes under the cascade of warm water and gentle progress of Thea’s hands combing through the length of my filthy hair. The small towel is wet and molds to my hips, and there is no way it can adequately disguise what the flow of warm water and the scrape of Thea’s fingers are doing to my body.

  She mixes something from her first aid kit, and when she turns back to me, she is armed with a nozzled container. “Close your eyes,” she says and irrigates the punctures left in my face by Tiberius’s fangs with something that smells acrid and medicinal.

  “Move that over,” she says, pointing with her chin at the towel that feels like a postage stamp and tents so far from my body that I can feel cool air on my balls. She doesn’t meet my eyes as she irrigates the claw marks on my torso.

  She grabs the clothes in the corner, bending over. My single eye swivels around her ass until she stands up and warns me that she has a small cistern.

  Of course she does. It’s made for one.

  I nod, because whatever she thinks, I am not from the city where water appears as if by some inexhaustible magic.

  Once the small towel is soapy, I turn off the water and wash everything. I scrub my arms and shoulders and chest. I scrub my feet and legs, trying to ignore the engorged thing that refuses to be ignored. But as I touch my ass and my lower back, I realize that the tightness in my balls and cock has spread to my spine, and if I don’t find release here, I will almost certainly find it in a less private and water-tight place.

  I have never fantasized before. Pack do not waste energy on females who are not receptive. And as for all those humans, once I was done with them, I wanted to forget them entirely, not summon up Technicolor re-creations during my most intimate moments.

  But now, I can’t help it. As I pump forward into my terry-covered hand, against the dark screen of my eyes, I see Thea. All gold and black. Noble colors. Her nipples will be bronzed and her breasts will be perfect size for my hands and they will feel soft, not at all like those big ones that feel like ziplock bags overfilled with pudding.

  Her voice echoes in my mind. You better come inside, she says, but this time, it is more urgent. This time as she says it, she parts her thighs. My fingers carve runnels into the skin, and I pull her open wider and fit my…

  With a barely contained snarl, I come.

  Still panting against the wall, unsure what to do with the contents of the soaked terry cloth. I rinse it as thoroughly as I can in the shower before stumbling out and drying off. The old crate that serves as her medicine chest is just a little deeper than a printer’s box and has no front to it, so nothing is hidden. Not that much is here, no first aid. Some aspirin, lipstick, skin lotion, coconut oil.

  Then I catch sight of myself in the mirror glued above her sink. Of course, I couldn’t be injured the way movie heroes are—an elegant scrape below the cheekbone or a clean cut above the brow. They never have something disfiguring, like a right eye that has turned purple and swollen shut. Or a nose that has become mottled and distended.

  I look like a perverted eggplant.

  There’s a rapid knock on the door. “Hey.”

  “Yes?”

  “This is all I have.” Thea snakes her arm through the crack in the door and hands off a tiny stack consisting of a long-sleeved T-shirt that says Pittsburgh Steelers and is seriously too tight and basketball shorts that are too short. They are clearly from some earlier man, maybe Doug, but because he was on the stout side, the shorts fit me where it counts.

  Thea is sitting on her bed, her back to me. There’s a tiny sliver of skin the color of rye between her sweater and jeans.
As soon as the door opens, she pulls at her sweater and picks up a tube from the bedside table.

  Antibiotic. I don’t need it, but I can hardly explain to her that I heal quickly and am not susceptible to infection from whatever is on a wolf’s claws or teeth. Besides, she might stop touching me, and more than anything, I need the trace of her fingers.

  I need her touch.

  Thea smooths antibiotic ointment around my nose and my cheek and my eye socket. “Look up?” she says, moving in close. I part my knees a little to give her access to my eye.

  Okay, no. This…this was a mistake.

  The ointment glistens on her fingers as she moves toward the tear at my hip. “I’ve got it,” I mutter and smear the antibiotic on the claw marks. Two inches over, and Tiberius would have castrated me. Which, I think as I try to figure out how to readjust the gourd in my shorts, might have made life easier.

  “Your clothes are on the dryer,” she says, leaving me to wonder, Dryer? What dryer? There’s no way she has a dryer, but then I understand why she said on. My clothes—washed and wrung out—are laid across what looks to be the side of a crib suspended from a line-and-pulley system near the fire. The loose end is wound around a metal cleat screwed into the amber wood of the wall.

  “You should be okay, but the snow is getting worse. I need to get food before the roads are closed.” She pulls on her jacket. “Do you know how to stoke the fire?”

  I nod. “Wait, you’re just leaving me here?”

  “You go if you want, but be careful. These roads aren’t the first ones plowed.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, you’re just leaving me in your house?”

  “What? Were you going to take something? A bowl? My teapot? A library book? Okay, that’d be a nuisance. But there’s no lock on the door, so anyone could. If you do decide to go before I get back, just make sure to close it tight. You may have to pull it a little.” She takes her car keys down from a nail by the door.

  “Wait, Thea?”

  She stops, her head turned slightly.

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me?”

  She swings her worn rucksack across one shoulder and shrugs.

  “Because you need it.”

  When she closes the door, she pulls it that little extra bit until it clicks.

  Chapter 17

  There really isn’t anything here to steal. A random collection of books—a biography of Walt Whitman. A history of dueling. The Tale of Genji. Thrillers and mysteries and books with buff-chested men who look like miniature versions of me. Except none of them have the rotting-gourd face. All with bar codes and bookplates saying Property of the Crandall Public Library.

  I pick up a selection by Aldo Leopold and curl under the quilt that lies loose at the foot of her bed and begin to read.

  By the time I wake up, the snow has started in earnest and the sky is charcoal. And though the cabin is still warm, the fire is dying down.

  I push the glowing logs around with a poker and lay on two more logs, close but not touching. I don’t need the lamps. My sight is good enough with just the firelight and the dull remnants of day that seem to spread out from everywhere and nowhere. I lean my face along the window toward the road, feeling the cool glass against my damaged eye, and wait. A limb overburdened by snow cracks and falls.

  I wait. I need Thea to come home. I mean, come back. To her home.

  Finally, lights come bouncing along the rough road, picking out the thick clumps of snow and making them glow brightly. Stone and snow crunch under her tires, and a door bangs. Then another door. I run out in my bare feet, and Thea hands me two bags before taking the other two and slamming the back door closed.

  “You’re not going to make it out now,” she says. Her black hair is netted with melting droplets that shimmer as soon as she gets into the cabin. “But I brought extra food. You can take the bed.”

  I start to argue, but she stops me, saying that she frequently falls asleep on the chaise.

  Settling her bags on the floor, she shakes out her coat and hangs it from the corner of the “clothes dryer,” next to my clothes. She puts her boots to the side of the stove and her gloves on a mitten dryer on the chimney. Melting snow drips onto the hot iron with a staccato hiss.

  “You hungry?”

  “Very,” I say, because I really am.

  Opening the bags, she pulls out bread and cheese and butter and spinach and eggs. She puts butter into the cast-iron skillet and layers bread along the bottom. While the cabin fills with the smell of toasted bread, she stirs cheese and eggs and tarragon and spinach and pours the mixture over the top.

  She cuts one piece for me and puts it on a large plate. Another smaller piece for herself on a small plate. I try to push away the knife and fork, because that leaves her eating with a spoon, but she pulls a wicked hunting knife from her backpack.

  Too pumped to eat since that gristly buck-leg snack, I’m suddenly starving, and I swear that of all the fine foods I’ve eaten, nothing has ever tasted so good. The bread is buttery and crispy at the bottom and soaked in cheese and eggs and tarragon on the top. And I don’t have to purge after.

  She puts away the rest of her groceries while I wash and dry and put each thing on her single shelf. At the Homelands, everyone works. Everyone. We do laundry and scrape hides and wash toilets, and good Alphas lead by example, not by delegation.

  Thea heads into the shower, and when she comes out a few minutes later, her hair is a damp black tangle over a white Henley and gray leggings. She puts two more logs on the fire and adds water to the kettle. A dinged metal cylinder with cherry blossoms on it makes a little squeak as she unscrews its lid. “Tea?”

  “No. I’m okay.”

  So that when the water boils, she can use the single mug.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not really set up for entertaining,” she says, setting her teacup on the pine table next to her chair.

  I can’t tell whether she’s apologizing for her lack of a television or some more intrinsic absence in her personality.

  “We could just talk,” I say.

  “Talk or chat?”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Chatting means asking questions with answers that don’t matter.” She slides into her chaise and pulls the throw over her legs. “I don’t much like chatting.”

  “Talk then.”

  “So. How come you have claw marks on your gut and tooth marks on your face?”

  Tapping my fingers against my chin, I give her a tight smile. “You know, maybe I don’t actually need to be entertained.”

  She digs a book out from the slot between her chair’s seat cushion and arm and opens it, wrapping the dark-olive grosgrain ribbon she used as a bookmark around her finger and rubbing it gently over the top of her lip.

  Well.

  Gingerly, I pull myself onto her bed and move an extra pillow around to keep my head up. On the other side of the bed, the side closest to the bathroom, is a row of books without plastic covers or bookplates. The top one is beyond dog-eared. The fore edge was originally reddish but has faded to pink with bleached-out drops and a dark-gray middle where the oils of her fingers have rubbed it repeatedly. The cover is gone, though there are traces of tape that she must have used to try to keep it together.

  “That’s the one thing I’d hate to lose,” she says, still looking at her book. “I’ve had it for a while.”

  “I can tell.” Although the cover and first pages are missing, I know what it is. John and Nils both taught English literature, so we are better read than most Packs. Better read than humans goes without saying.

  “‘The great man’”—I try to remember the quotes and strip away the emendations that John made, altering them to our circumstances; “the great wolf” was what he actually said—“‘is the one who in the midst of the crowd’”—John
said “of humans”—“‘keeps with perfect sweetness the stillness of the forest.’”

  She stares at her book for a moment and then puts her finger on a passage.

  “The quote is ‘keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.’ I like yours though.”

  “My old English teacher loved Emerson. But I learned it a long time ago. Must have mixed it up.”

  Of course I didn’t. The summer before we were to go Offland, Leonora did her best to make sure that those of us who were leaving understood how to appear human in the world they had re-created in their image.

  John tried to do something altogether more subtle and difficult. Whatever disguises we were wearing, he wanted to make sure that we preserved the Homelands within us. He wanted us to make sure that there was a place for the wild inside, even if there wasn’t a place for it anywhere else.

  “You liked your English teacher?”

  “What? My… Yes. Very much. He was more than an English teacher. He was kind of the…head of our little rural community. We’re very tight-knit, but tempers can run short. He worked hard to keep everyone together.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “He died. Suddenly. A couple of months ago. His wife is trying to take over, but it’s hard, and I think I’ve made everything more difficult for her.”

  She dunks the tea bag a few times before fishing it out with a spoon and, wrapping the string around it, squeezes it dry. “Was it worth fighting for?”

  “I didn’t win, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Not really. A good fight isn’t about the outcome. It’s about knowing that you’ve made things better by trying.”

  Then I hear Victor’s voice. “You will win, Alpha,” he says. My one advocate with his sour, judgmental voice and his sour, judgmental face.

  “Honestly, I don’t know if it was worth fighting for. I don’t know anything anymore. And no one seems to know who I am.”

  When she blows across her tea, she sends the damp-orchid-and-honey scent to my waiting nose.

  “Do you? Know who you are?”