“But I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”
Hannah put a hand over her mouth and left the room.
—pretending that she has drowned.
Sometimes, in the woods, as the wolf boy, on my hands and knees, stalking a rabbit or a mouse or a squirrel, pretending, I would stop, and in a moment of embarrassed self-consciousness I could not remember who I was—Pilot or Eric. More accurately, I couldn’t remember who I was supposed to be. I knew I wasn’t really the wolf boy. I knew that I was only a boy, a human being, who belonged to the house with the white-painted brick walls on the other side of the trees, past the open, overgrown lawn, behind the empty, unused, cracked pool and the buckling flagstones.
I am the wolf boy, I wanted to say. I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands.
That day in the kitchen, the scent of my mother’s rhubarb pie strong in the air, the crust all melty and underdone, there was a dead-on collision of forgetfulness and memory. I found myself looking through the eyes of the wolf boy again. How long had it been?
That day, our mother saw double, but I saw one thing.
One thing, twenty years old, clear for a fraction of an instant.
Later, I was on the phone with my brother.
“Is there anything wrong with her?” I wanted to know.
“It’s too early to tell,” Eric said. “I’m not sure.”
I suddenly realized that I was standing in the living room. I said, “You’re the brainiac. I thought you understood these things.”
His voice was dismissive, as usual. “It could be anything,” he said. “It’s probably just stress.”
“Stress.”
“Things bother her.”
Our mother’s living room had become cluttered. Mismatched pillows and throw blankets, decorator styles and patterns merged recklessly—plaids with paisleys, stripes with florals. “I guess so.” I couldn’t remember walking into this room. I remembered how it used to be so tasteful, a page from a magazine.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?” I looked at the phone. Suddenly it was black. I had never noticed that this telephone was black. It had a rotary dial, too. I didn’t remember dialing it. I looked at my finger. What fucking year was this?
“Pilot,” my brother said. “Stop humming.”
“I really don’t know, Eric. Things are weird. I’m compelled to tell you the truth,” I said, “and things aren’t exactly right.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“And besides, we’re talking about Hannah.”
He exhaled. “I hate it when you call her that.”
“It’s her name.”
“She’s our mother.”
“Anyway,” I said, “what about her?”
“I don’t know, Pilot. It’s probably nothing.”
Hannah, at that moment, was driving home from the cavernous housewares discount store that had replaced the old Kmart on Sky Highway. It was called Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Whenever she came home from Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Hannah spoke reverently of it, in a hushed voice, marveling at the selections of toaster ovens and bath towels. She was leaning down to reach an old Joan Baez tape that lay on the floor of her cream-colored early seventies Mercedes sports car, and when she looked back up she saw two entirely distinct Sky Highways. I knew this because at that moment, at that very second, in fact, I heard a soft beep inside the telephone line.
“There’s another call,” I told Eric. “Hold on.” I pressed the plastic hang-up button on this old, black, rotary-dial telephone that I had never seen before in my life, and I said into it, “Hello?”
“Pilot.” It was Hannah on her cellular. I could tell something was wrong.
“What is it?”
“I’ve pulled over.”
“Where are you?”
“Right in front of the turnpike.”
“Is it the car?” It was a false question. I knew it wasn’t the car.
“It’s me,” my mother said. “I’m seeing ghosts. I’m seeing a whole ghost Sky Highway. There’s a ghost Mobil station on the ghost corner. There’s a ghost dashboard right in front of me, a ghost steering wheel, everything. I don’t think I should drive home.”
“I’ll come get you.”
“Pilot,” our mother said. “No.” I waited for what I knew she would say. “Pilot, I just left a message for Eric. He can—”
“I’m on the other line with him right now, which is why he’s not answering.” Which is why you resorted to calling me, I thought. “But Mom, I can handle this.”
“Pilot, just—”
I cut her off. “Eric?” I said. “That’s Hannah on the other line. I have to go.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’ll be fine,” I told him. “I have to go.”
I was struck by the weirdness of things. I asked myself if failure can become insanity. For some reason I thought I heard people having a conversation upstairs, even though I knew no one was home. They were saying my name. I put on some old running sneakers I found in the hallway closet. I hadn’t worn this particular pair of Converse low-tops since high school, which was more than ten years ago. One of the laces came undone, slipped through the metal eyelets and into my hand. It was just an old shoelace—worn, blackened from time, frayed at one end. But millions of thoughts flickered across my mind like moths against a patio light. A shoelace. I didn’t have time to tie this stupid shoe. I was off to rescue our mother, Hannah, who sat helpless, seeing ghosts, in her Mercedes by the highway.
Eric opened the door to his office and asked his secretary, “Diane, did my mother call?”
“She’s on line two,” Diane said. “She’s holding.”
He went back to his desk and clicked a button on his telephone, which was blinking red. “Mom?”
Our mother was on the line. “What did Pilot tell you?” She sat in her Mercedes, the light fading from the sky, seeing double.
“Nothing,” Eric answered. “Just that he had to go, and then he hung up.”
“I’m seeing ghosts, so I pulled over.” She sighed. “I tried to call you, Eric, but you were, you were with a patient or something, so I called Pilot instead and he said he’d come get me, but—”
“But there’s no car for him to drive. He’s so fucking stupid. How’s he going to—”
“I guess he’ll walk, that’s all, and don’t call him stupid.”
“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Eric said. “He is stupid. Where the hell are you, anyway?”
“Right in front of the turnpike, across from the Mobil station.”
“He’ll walk through the woods, I guess.”
Her voice was resigned. “I guess so.”
They imagined me, the two of them. They saw me leaving the house through the kitchen door. They saw my black Converse All Stars caking with mud as I stepped off the patio into the backyard. Did they imagine the feeling I had of the Earth separating from itself, its tectonic plates shifting deep beneath the forest floor, adjusting under the layers of leaves, mulch, dirt, and limestone? Of the trees encroaching, preparing to swallow me the way one paramecium absorbs another?
“Will you come and get me, Eric?” our mother asked. “Please?”
Did they know that things had become transparent again, clear as a blue sky seen through blue water? That I could actually see the cancer forming like a tulip bulb on the base of my mother’s optical nerve? I could look through the trees all the way to the highway, through her car, and through her hair and skin and cartilage and bone into the folds of tissue around her eyes, to see the muscles dilating, the tendrils of nerves and vessels of blood, and the radical cells dividing there, and dividing again, a tumor the size of the dot over a letter i. Eric had removed his lab coat and was slipping his dark gray suit jacket on, the telephone handset wedged precariously between his neck and shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said, and then he repeated a phrase our mother had used earlier that day. “I’m already gone.”
The woods behind our parents’ house were wide and tall and stretched all the way to the highway. Along the back of our yard the trees were deciduous—oak, maple, birch—whose leaves would drop in the fall to create a blanket of brown and gold through which, in childhood, I would crawl, breathing deeply the dry, acrid, wonderful smell. As these woods grew closer and closer to Sky Highway, however, the trees became pine, and their needles remained green—seemed, in fact, to grow greener—as the bleak winter wore on. There were clearings here as familiar to me as my childhood bedroom. There were trees I had climbed so often I thought of them as furniture. I remembered particular saplings that had become full grown. I could pinpoint in the woods of my memory exactly where certain bushes had gathered, where a nest of brown-feathered thrushes had lived, where a bees’ nest hummed and quivered on a high branch.
I walked toward the highway.
I twisted and untwisted the shoelace, the one that had come undone in my hand, around and around my middle finger.
Winter was coming.
In the winter the woods were cold and empty, and the snow covered the ground like a white sheet of paper, and the shadows of the trees crossed the snow like black marks of ink. I’d crunch through the hard crust of ice and stand, shivering. Always there was the roaring sound of the highway in the distance, and always there was the sound of the wind in the trees. If I stayed out here long enough, I learned, I became numb, numb to the cold and more. For a time I could sit on that old broken concrete pipe in the clearing and listen to the cars on the highway and hear the high-pitched whistle of the wind in the treetops and the low falling of snow dropping from the branches and not feel a thing, become the wolf boy, my emotions too simple for language or memory.
Black-feathered ravens lit on the branches high above and called out to each other obnoxiously, like teenage boys.
The wolf boy—Pilot, Eric, whoever.
These woods in spring thawed quickly, it seemed, messily. The floor became mud, and the melting of the snow created oozing black mulch, especially along the path that led to Thomas Edison, the junior high school Eric and I had attended. The tops of the trees were the first to green, naturally, and as the warm light reached the ground, there soon sprouted one million fingers of fern, all beckoning seductively in the breeze.
The summer filled the woods with bugs, flies that buzzed and gnats that shot at my ears, with crawling things that scurried under rocks and burrowed through the dirt and droppings of shit. Squirrels chased each other around tree trunks, fat as my mother’s teapots, gorging themselves on acorns. I would emerge from these woods in the summer covered with tiny red welts, bites of every variety, bee stings and scratches.
One of those summers I discovered a nest of tiny green snakes, as bright as tubes of neon in a beer commercial, beneath an overturned rock. They swarmed and wriggled grotesquely, each one a miniature of its full-grown future.
They would not change, I realized then, except to become larger.
I had not changed, I realized now, except to become larger.
Over the course of the next week or two, I dropped crickets and other bugs into this snake nest, and I watched the tiny green vipers or whatever they were attack and swallow the insects, their whispery little tongues sliding in and out of their mouths.
I stopped for a moment, listening for the highway in the distance.
When our father was a boy he trapped mink and muskrats, then sold their pelts to Sears and Roebuck. He had kept his traps in an old box in the garage. The same summer, the summer I found the snakes, Eric discovered our father’s old animal traps and set them, one by one, throughout the woods. He caught rabbits, squirrels, an adolescent raccoon, and, according to him, Halley the Comet, our family cat.
That was the year before Fiona disappeared.
And then came the year we lost her.
And the year after.
I was the wolf boy that year, and one afternoon I approached an empty trap and saw the scrap of meat, coagulated and raw, that Eric had placed in it. I moved my face toward it gingerly, just, as I believed, an animal—a real wolf—would do.
I backed away, though, wary.
In the fall I rejoiced at the pyrotechnics of death in these woods. The reds and golds, the explosions of leaves falling like slow-motion fireworks. In these woods death calls such beautiful attention to itself. It cascades in gorgeousness, opulent with colors. In people, death simply washes our color away, turning us blue and gray.
But Eric had lied about Halley the Comet. He had sliced our cat’s leg off with a hunting knife—
Today, it was fall. I started walking again.
—a knife our father had given him. It was sleek, leather-sheathed, with a silver inlay of a rhinoceros embedded in the handle, and razor sharp.
While Hannah waited by the highway, I walked through layers of stiff, wiry branches that dragged against my wind-breaker and snapped back against my face. I had known these woods so well when I was the wolf boy. I had crept through the underbrush and had buried myself in the dry, brown leaves, leaves that made a crackling sound like the paper on Eric’s examining table. As a boy, I had climbed into these branches and waited for a silence to arrive like a hearse at a funeral home.
There was a path somewhere that led to Sky Highway, and I remembered running along it full speed, my arms reaching to touch the leaves of low hanging branches, my eyes closed, my head back. Where was it now? Early evening, the sun descended a single notch. Maybe it was this way. I walked into the clearing beyond which, I thought, must be the highway. Why did everything seem so unfamiliar? I could hear my own breathing, a dog panting. Along the junior high was another path that led to Sky Highway, I remembered. I thought I heard other people, two voices in mid-discussion. Above, the sky had become chemical yellow, striped with dark gray. I stopped to consider my position. Where the hell was I? The trees had become black, too, and I realized how heavily I had been inhaling and exhaling. I had to be careful. I have a tendency to hyperventilate. Could I see my breath? No. It was still too early in the season for that. Perhaps in the morning. I had moved off the path that led away from the house and now, looking back, could not regain it. I imagined the woods had somehow subsumed the house. Sometimes, I thought, these branches will lash out and swallow cars, houses, people. Had I been swallowed, too?
Yes.
I twisted the broken shoelace around my middle finger, cutting off the flow of blood, and I felt my artery throb.
What I thought had been the path to the turnpike was merely a clearing under an enormous oak. Why didn’t I recognize it? A squirrel scurried around the trunk of the tree. I walked around it to get a better look at this animal, but he anticipated me and kept always on the other side.
I was losing time.
As a boy, I had loved the way the breezes moved through the forest, and when I was the wolf boy I could close my eyes and move, feeling my way through the crackling leaves and snapping, cheek-stinging branches, hearing the sounds of the highway in the distance, smelling the burnt smell of the rotting leaves. I pushed my hands into my pockets to keep them from rising into the air like helium balloons. I dug my feet firmly into the earth as I walked. I closed and opened my eyes in a rhythm.
One of my shoes was slipping on and off. But I didn’t care.
I twisted the shoelace tighter around my finger—tighter and tighter.
Where was the highway? I wished I had a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked in months, I realized, hadn’t even thought about it. But now the darkness was drifting through the trees and I was feeling light drops of rain. Perfect cigarette weather. My face had disappeared, too, so I touched it and discovered that it was wet. Rain? Tears? When I looked at my finger I saw the familiar smear of brownish blood. I was bleeding. It must have been from the snapping of the small branches against my skin. I was inside the thickest part of the woods now. Yet I could still hear those voices, and every now and then it seemed as though they were discussing my progress. I tasted the blood on my finge
r. It made me realize how hungry I was. I looked around with the eyes of the wolf boy, transformed. I would be coming out on the other side in a moment, I was sure of it, and I could hear the cars over the next rise, could sense the sky, smoggy and absolute, over the row of convenience stores and discount centers that I knew were there—the 7-Eleven, the Taco Bell, Marshalls, Amazing Drug Discounts, the Mobil station, Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I was Balboa nearing the Pacific. If I followed this path, it would lead me there, to Hannah, to our mother, Eric’s and mine, Hannah who had been seeing ghosts, who waited for Eric to rescue her, but who had no idea that it was only me, Pilot the wolf boy, who could rescue her truly; it was only her youngest son—starved for the taste of blood, and bleeding—who could save her.
Hair like a trillion twisted threads of gold, a mole like a drop of blood on her collarbone, her name was Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy. And right now she sat on a mattress in her small apartment—the enclosure, as she called it—with a view of these woods and allowed the telephone to ring. She knew who it was—either Mark or Michele—and she certainly didn’t want to speak to Michele. But when the answering machine answered and she heard Mark’s voice, plaintive, worried, pained, she couldn’t help herself. “Hello?” she said, knowing the mistake she was making, knowing it would be the last one of its kind.
I sat down in a clearing I thought I recognized from childhood. There was a tall maple, its branches like a parachute falling perpetually toward the flattened grasses and ferns. And with the quick-falling darkness I saw behind the limbs of the trees the sky smoothing over, its colors artificial and flat. I saw the rest of the woods leveling off like a painted backdrop. I lost my sense of language. I forgot who I was. The woods, I knew, were hungry to swallow things. The woods had already taken my mother’s house, and I could sense the trees and moss rolling forward like a wave to wash over the entire neighborhood, subsuming cars, backyard pools, carports, entire cul-de-sacs.
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