Juney declines to answer. She only looks haughtier than ever.
“How many times have I told you? Never, ever tell anyone about our wolves.”
“You did—you told those boys. I heard you.”
Rin scrapes the dust off a fingernail. “That’s true. I was trying to scare them. My mistake. But it doesn’t mean you can repeat it.”
“Why not?” And then Juney asks for the first time ever, “What’s wrong with telling?”
Rin cleans another nail. “Because folks won’t like the idea of wolves living around here. They’re ignorant and prejudiced about wolves. They think they’re much more dangerous than they are. . . . They hate them.”
“Like you hate people?” Juney lifts her chin, her water-pale eyes swiveling to the ceiling.
“I don’t—” Rin stops. She may have to hide certain matters from her child, but she won’t tell her a bald-faced lie. “That’s my problem. I know it isn’t healthy. I wasn’t always this way. But yes, a lot of folks are like that about wolves.”
“Maybe . . .” Juney starts swaying again, her voice sliding into one of her singsong tones. “Maybe you don’t hate people, Mommy. Maybe you just want to keep our wolves all to yourself.”
Rin shakes her head, which of course Juney can’t see. A nine-year-old shrink she has here. “No, it’s just that I don’t want anyone taking them away. They’re the only family we’ve got, aside from each other and the mutts, right? So we have to protect them, just like they protect us.” What else has she to offer this child who has never known her father, her uncle, or any of her grandparents—who has been raised by a lone woman and her crowd of ghosts?
She moves over to Juney and embraces her, kissing the top of her head, silk-soft and damp. “I need to take a shower. But tell me first, little bean, are you feeling sad?”
Juney sways back and forth on her chair, humming again. Raising her hands, she fingers the air as delicately as if she’s catching a sunbeam. She hums and hums. But she offers no answer.
In the shower, Rin turns the conversation over, worrying the mama worry that won’t stop boring into her bones. Is it that curse of a boy troubling Juney—that she misses him when he’s not here? Or has his intrusion opened a new door through which she has glimpsed something bigger than she has at home? Rin has built such a careful world around her: Their farm. The school where Juney has her own specialist to help her in class and where everyone has learned to accommodate her needs. Her field trips with other sightless children. Were Rin to draw a map of this world, there would be a knot in the middle—their home—and maybe three paths looping out of it and back again, like a bow on top of a present. But she has always known the day will come when Juney will want more than this. And when it does, when she is ready to venture into the universe alone, that is when it will hit her, the fact that Rin has worked so hard to protect her from—the irrefutable blastwall of a fact that she can’t see when most of the world can, and nobody will give a damn.
11
ENEMY
For two weeks now, Tariq has refused to return to baseball camp, preferring to go to work with Louis at S&A Lumber. The days can be dull, but he does like the way he gets to command the seasons. Banishing summer to the ON SALE corner in the back by tucking away leftover mosquito torches and barbecue chef hats. Ushering in autumn with rakes and pumpkin-colored garbage bags. Preparing for winter by following the orders Louis barks at his staff like the squad leader he once was. “Stack the firewood against the west wall!” “Roll out the snow shovels!” Best of all, he likes arranging the decorative items in the middle aisle: doormats saying Oh Crap, Not You Again; mailboxes the shape of gaping fish; a clock he wishes he could buy for Juney showing twelve different birds, each trilling out its song on the hour. He knows his mother would find these objects absurd and wasteful, but he would love to fill their house with silly things like this. To be able to look at them and simply laugh.
It is on one of these mornings that Louis suggests taking him to see Naema again. “Slow day today so I can stay longer than usual. What do you say?”
Tariq hesitates. What if she is no better than last time, waxen and silent?
“It’s been a while, bud,” Louis adds. “I think you should come.”
They drive to the hospital sunk in the same wordless anxiety as before, Tariq’s stomach drawn so tight he can scarcely breathe.
As soon as they spin through the revolving doors, they run into Mustapha Rasheed, his blocky, square-shouldered figure hurrying toward the exit. He avoids looking at Louis altogether, but he does address Tariq. “Nice to see you, dear one,” he says in Arabic, patting him on the head. “How is my little man today?”
Tariq mumbles at the floor.
“It’s good you are coming to visit your mother like this. A dutiful son.”
Tariq shrugs, eyes still down.
“If you want me to bring you here anytime, call me and I shall. All right, my boy?”
Mustapha waits a long moment for an answer while the air fills with Tariq’s silence.
“Well,” Mustapha says, clearly disconcerted, “I won’t keep you. There’s a surprise for you upstairs. Salaam.” He bends to kiss Tariq on each cheek while Louis watches. Louis knows from Naema that Mustapha was a military interpreter like Khalil and was kidnapped and tortured for his efforts, barely escaping with his life. But knowing this only makes Louis feel ashamed.
After Mustapha straightens up, pats Tariq on the head again and strides out of the hospital, Tariq hurries to the elevator with obvious relief. Once he and Louis reach Naema’s room, though, he balks again. “I don’t want to go in yet. Can I just wait?”
Louis looks at him. “What’s wrong?”
Tariq clutches his stomach, huddling into himself like a cornered mouse. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Want me to go with you?”
“No, I know where it is.” He hurries off, Louis watching in concern.
Taking a deep breath, Louis pushes open the door. Walking past the first bed, its occupant eerily silent, he steps through Naema’s curtains and stops.
She is sitting up. Her head is turned toward the window. Her hair, freshly washed and brushed, is draped over her shoulders like a shawl. Her thin wrists are clear of all but one IV line. And, at last, she is free of her mask.
“Naema!”
She looks around. The two of them gaze at each other a moment. And then she breaks into a smile.
He pulls a chair over, too overcome to say more, searching her face for the Naema he knows. The sweep of her high-boned cheeks, her swallow-shaped eyes, her neck as slender as a girl’s—these stir the old longing in him as powerfully as ever. Yet she is still drained of color, the white star even whiter.
She holds out a hand to him on the bedspread and he wraps his three fingers around it, barely able to stop himself from covering her palm with kisses. Her wrists are bruised from the IV needles, her hand cold and dry.
“How are you feeling?” he finally manages. “God, it’s good to see you awake.”
Removing her hand, as she always does if he holds it too long, she inhales with an audible effort. “I am . . . much better.” He can hear her struggling to draw in air between every other word. “I was going to call you . . . as soon as I awoke. But Mustapha, he came.” She inhales again and points to a plastic tube beside her, fat and translucent, a Ping-Pong ball nestled inside it. “They tell me I must . . . breathe into that. Blow and blow . . . all day. Like a child . . . with a balloon.” She smiles, her chest heaving. “Where is . . . Tariq?”
“He’s coming. He went to bathroom. This place makes him nervous.”
“Yes.” She inhales again. “He is afraid . . . of hospitals. Before he comes back, tell me . . . has he been all right?”
Louis longs to take her hand again but doesn’t dare. “He’s fine. You’ve got a resilient little guy there. He’s staying at my house and coming to work with me. He’s been a great help. You don’t remember him visitin
g you?”
“I remember nothing but dreams. But why is he not with Flanner and going . . . to camp?”
Tariq steps through the curtains at that moment, sparing Louis the necessity of answering. “Mama!” he shouts. “Mama, you’re better!” He runs over, about to fling himself on her when Louis stops him.
“Careful, bud. Your mom’s not quite strong enough to have a big guy like you jump on her.”
Tariq leans over the bed instead and wraps his arms around her waist, burying his head in her ribs. “You’re better! You’re better! You’re better!”
Naema caresses his curls, her eyes moistening. “Your hair, habibi . . . it has grown so long . . . I can’t see you,” she says in Arabic, lifting the tangle off his brow. “Ah, there you are!” He looks up at her with a grin.
Louis pulls his chair closer. “I’m so sorry this happened to you, Naema. I’m so very sorry.”
Her gaze lingers on Tariq a moment before she looks up. “Thank you . . . but do not . . . be sorry. Not everything is . . . your fault, my friend.” She knows about Louis’s tendency to blame himself, just as she knows about Melody.
“But this shouldn’t have happened to you,” he protests. “Nobody else in the clinic—”
Tariq interrupts. “Mama, can you come home now? Can we pack your stuff and leave this creepy place? Please?” He is speaking English, as he always does these days, no matter how much she objects.
“No, not yet, my love,” she murmurs in kind. “But soon . . . inshallah, soon.”
He picks up a strand of her hair and winds it around his fingers, a habit he’s had all his life. “But when you do come home, will you be completely better?” He looks at her anxiously. “I mean like you were before?”
“I shall try . . . to be, yes.”
Louis stares down at his hands.
“Good.” Tariq is smiling now. “Because when you are, I want you to meet my new friend.”
“You have a new . . . friend?”
“Yes. She’s the best I’ve ever had.” He studies the strand of hair entwined in his fingers and then looks back at his mother. “Her name is Juney and she’s blind.”
Flanner is standing at his bedroom window, pressing his forehead against the glass as hard as he can. Now that the excitement of the hurricane is over and everything is more or less back to normal, he is sick of summer. Sick of the long, hot evenings dragging vapidly by. Sick of the boys at his YMCA baseball camp, most of whom are city kids here on vacation and too snooty to play with locals like him. And sick of spending the end of every day like this with nobody better than his mother.
He grinds his forehead against the window just to feel its cool surface imprinting his flesh. An ATV roars past, driven by that snarling teenager up the road, but the ensuing silence only makes the afternoon emptier than ever.
Flanner’s world is shrinking. The walls of his room are closing in, the ceiling lowering down on his head, the yard looking smaller and dingier by the day. Even the meadow, the one that was full of pink sea during the storm and used to seem boundless and filled with possibilities, has shriveled to nothing but a patch of weeds. His sole avenue to a larger world, other than TV, is his laptop, on which he has taken not only to playing war games but to looking up war pictures and videos: Soldiers dancing like strippers in a tent. A boy screaming armless on a stretcher. A marine with a face like ground beef. A woman sprawled dead in a market street, an infant girl in her arms, her head torn off like a pulled tooth.
Flanner’s eyes catch a movement. Someone is crossing the meadow—a kid—moving fast . . . Tariq! He runs downstairs and into his yard, completely forgetting their feud. “Tariq!” He waves his arms. “Wait up!”
Tariq glances his way before flickering out of sight behind a tree, then appearing again. He looks oddly ethereal in the late-afternoon light, half swallowed by waist-high grasses and rose-tinted milkweed. Flanner waits for him to come over, smiling eagerly, hands in his pockets. But Tariq only keeps going. He ducks under a barbed-wire fence, clambers up the freshly hayed field beyond, and vanishes into the woods.
Flanner stares after him, bewildered. Why would he do that?
He decides to follow him. Track Tariq the way a marine scout would track an enemy. And maybe confront him, too.
Tariq is so far ahead by now that Flanner has to run to catch up. He bounds up the stubbled field, reveling in the sensation of moving instead of being trapped in the house. By the time he reaches the woods, Tariq is out of sight, so Flanner stops to listen. Before long, he picks out the crunching and twig snaps of a human tread. He follows, matching his footfalls to Tariq’s.
The deeper they penetrate the woods, the harder it is to see, the trees only allowing the sun to break in here and there with a shaft of brassy light. When he and Tariq were friends, Flanner used to find it pleasingly spooky to walk among the vast and ancient trees of these woods, the pine and beech, oak and hornbeam and hemlock, their trunks patched with moss, branches netted with vines. It was like being surrounded by the legs of giants. Now, the woods only seem dark and endless.
Tariq is humming and talking to himself now, believing he is alone, which makes Flanner feel smug. But as time crawls by, flies dive-bomb his eyes, burrs creep into his shoes, and he grows increasingly itchy and thirsty, the game loses its thrill. Sneaking up on someone for a few minutes is quite different from doing it for nearly an hour, and playing with someone who doesn’t know you’re playing is no better than playing by yourself. Several times he almost calls out to Tariq to put an end to it. But having no idea how to explain his presence without looking like a loser, he continues to trail him in silence, feeling more miserable by the minute.
Flanner has long since guessed where they are headed, and, sure enough, after what seems like forever, they reach the same towering fence as before. He slips behind a tree and waits to see what will happen.
Tariq walks up to the fence and stands there a moment, perfectly still. Then he lifts his face, cups his hands to his mouth and cries out with a sound so penetrating and inhuman that Flanner drops to a crouch in fright. He dares to peer out only when he hears Tariq talking. Tariq is leaning into the fence now, mumbling something guttural Flanner can’t decipher. And there, pressed up against the other side, is a long-legged, huge-headed, hulking gray-and-white creature that can only be a wolf. Even worse, Tariq has poked his fingers right through the fence.
Get your fingers out! Flanner is about to yell. But it is so clear that Tariq isn’t afraid that Flanner only creeps out from behind his tree to see better. The wolf isn’t eating Tariq’s fingers, as he feared, but sniffing them—and all the while Tariq is talking to him in his private language. And then Tariq squats by the fence, pushes his face against it, and actually lets the wolf lick him. Flanner gapes as the huge pink tongue slips out, pokes through the holes in the fence and slobbers all over Tariq’s nose and mouth. Why isn’t he scared the wolf will bite him? Take off an ear or even his nose? But Tariq only giggles while the wolf keeps licking, and as Flanner watches, he is seized by a longing to have that, too. To be able to talk to wolves like that—to have them lick you and not even be afraid!
Then, in a flash, everything changes. The wolf stops licking, pulls back its lips and emits a growl so deep and hair-raising that both Tariq and Flanner leap back with a cry. In the next instant, Mrs. Drummond pops up out of nowhere.
“Get your ass out of here!” she bellows at Flanner.
Flanner reels away, turns, and bolts.
Closing her laptop slowly, Beth walks downstairs to the kitchen to finish making dinner. A chicken is already roasting in the oven; she has only to snap the beans. She fills a large tumbler with red wine and puts Fleetwood Mac on to play, needing both for their soothing effects. The e-mail she just received from Todd is a shock. “Get Flanner ready 0200 hours EST. 8/26. Skype.”
She takes a long swallow. And another. If only Todd would agree to limit their communications to e-mail and letters and the occasional phone cal
l, the way they did during his first deployment. Computer cameras are so cruel: the time delay, the face-to-face focus, the way the picture both distorts and yet impels you to look. She glances at her watch and finishes off the wine. Pours another. Eight and a half hours to go.
Decapitating the string beans with practiced speed, she sweeps them into a frying pan, adds a wad of butter, and is just about to turn on the burner when Flanner comes hurtling into the kitchen. “Mom! Help!” He flies into her arms.
She holds him close. His knobby back; sharp, little-boy shoulders. “What happened, honey? You okay?”
He shakes his head, too out of breath to answer.
Pushing him off her gently, she bends to look him in the eye. “Did somebody hurt you?”
“No—yes! She screamed at me. And that wolf wanted to—”
“Are you talking about Rin Drummond? Did you try to see her wolves again?”
He nods, his breath shuddering. “I did see one! It was right there, a great huge one, big as a bear! It growled at me—it wanted to kill me!”
“Oh, my poor guy. Come here.” Beth leads him to the living room couch and sits him down next to her, where she holds him until his breath steadies. For once he allows this, even though she stinks of wine again. “I can’t believe that woman!” she says. “I’m calling Mike Flaherty about this.”
“Yeah. But don’t tell Dad, okay?” Shame is oozing into Flanner now. Tariq wasn’t scared, either of the wolf or of Mrs. Drummond. He wasn’t even scared that time she pointed a gun at them.
“Mom,” Flanner adds, “when your cop friend arrests that mean-ass lady, get him to shoot her wolves, too!”
Later that night, much later, Beth rouses herself from her wine and the television and heads upstairs to dress for Todd’s call. Stomach watery, head thick, she pulls on a flattering turquoise tank top, brushes her hair, and reapplies her makeup: shimmering pink lipstick, a thick streak of eyeliner on both lids, two coats of mascara, and peacock blue shadow to bring out her eyes. She peers into the laptop camera, trying to see herself as Todd will see her. But her face looks blotchy and her eyes are too washed out to show blue of any shade. Todd will see what he wants to see, she supposes, and beyond that she can do no more than she has done.
Wolf Season Page 9
