Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  Naema unlocks her front door, Tariq and Louis standing behind her, and steps inside, kicking off her sandals and standing on the bare wooden floor a moment just to bask in the relief of being home. Having lost a house and all her property twice, she is averse to accumulating belongings, but she likes her simple abode: the combination living and dining room, its walls the color of old linen; her comforting sofa and armchairs, plush and red; her crimson carpet woven with the tree of life. A row of potted ivies line the back windowsill, and her beloved fig tree stands waiting in a corner, its broad leaves splayed like the offering hands of a father, as if to say, “Alhamdulillah, you have returned once again, a phoenix from the ashes.”

  “Ah, I see someone has been watering my little garden,” she says.

  “Yes, me,” Tariq replies proudly.

  “You are a wonderful son. Now, I must rest.”

  Making her way across the room, she sets herself carefully down on the sofa, tucks her bare feet beneath her, and flicks her braid over her shoulder.

  “Can I do anything for you?” Louis asks from the doorway.

  She looks at him and smiles. Louis and his anxious hovering. “No, you have done enough. Come sit and relax.”

  Piling his shoes among the others on a shelf by the door, he takes the armchair beside her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, so happy to be here with her again that he hardly knows what to do with himself. If only he could lift her up and dance her about the room. But the few times he has tried even a hug, she has backed away.

  “Now,” she says, “tell me what happened in the storm. I realize you have been protecting me, but I am home now and strong enough to hear. I know my nurse, Wendy, she is the one who took me out of the flood and called the ambulance. But I remember none of that, only water and screams.”

  Louis glances at Tariq, who is standing by the kitchen door, listening gravely. “I’ve no idea what happened, except that something must have knocked you out when the clinic was collapsing. Wendy said there was a lot of debris crashing around in the water. It’s amazing no one else got hurt.”

  “Ah. The luck of the immigrant, no?” Naema is joking, but Louis can hear the bitterness in her words.

  “Yes, but now you’re home again and you’ll be getting stronger by the day.” He looks over at Tariq. “It’s great having your mom back, huh?”

  Tariq nods, yet a sadness is shadowing his face. Naema turns and sees it, too.

  “My love, I am all right, I promise,” she says, her voice soft. “Will you brew us some chai? You are so good at it.” She gazes at him a moment and then looks back at Louis. “That is another thing I missed in the hospital. You Americans, you know nothing about how to make tea. A cup of lukewarm water and a tea bag on the side. Imagine if you served coffee like that! A teaspoon of grounds on a saucer.” She looks again at Tariq. “Will you do that for us, little one?”

  “Of course, Mama.” He hurries off to the kitchen. “I’m going to be like Gray,” he tells himself, picturing the ripping fangs and glorious ferocity of his favorite wolf. “I’m going to protect Mama like an alpha male so she never, ever has bad luck again.”

  14

  HOME

  Beth pulls herself as upright as she can in her white, spike-heeled sandals, the tarmac burning her feet through their flimsy soles. The Family Readiness Officer told her to come to Albany airport this afternoon to meet Todd after he had been “processed,” a word she had always associated with sliced cheese until she married a marine. So here she is, corralled inside a roped-off area on the runway with other military families, like a groupie awaiting a rock star, her nails pressing into her palms.

  Flanner is equally upright beside her, dressed for the occasion in his best chinos and blue button-down shirt. His eyes are narrowed, his teeth gripping his upper lip. She rests a reassuring hand on his shoulder, but he shrugs it off and moves away. She wishes he didn’t have to wait for his father like this, as nervous as if he has to pass an exam. She wishes Todd had never done this to him. Or, for that matter, to her.

  She glances at the people clustered around her. Jacked-up children. Girlfriends in too much makeup and shorts so tiny they reveal crescents of buttock. Teary-eyed wives and husbands clutching American flags and clumsily spray-painted banners: WELCOME HOME MY HERO NOW YOU HAVE TO KISS ME. Ragged mothers and fathers, faces drained, eyes darting, as if awaiting a ghost. As bad as it is for us spouses, she thinks, it must be much worse for the parents. Todd’s tall, nicotine-skinned mother, for instance, who is so noticeably not here. Who regressed a long time ago into a second adolescence that came with widowhood and a new husband. How does even a mother like her bear up under the knowledge that her child is at war?

  Pushing back her sunglasses, which are making her face hot and her nose ache, Beth tries to distract herself by surveying the landscape. Acres of steamrolled macadam, oily and glittering. Airplanes squatting in the distance like colossal seagulls. The roar of planes rising and falling, rising and falling . . .

  A new roar, a blast of hot wind and diesel, and one of those planes thumps onto the tarmac and rolls to a stop in front of the crowd. A whoop bursts from the families around her. Her heart slams up against her collarbone.

  The plane growls. Falls silent.

  A second explosion of cheering and squealing, followed by a collective holding of breath while a back door opens like a mouth and a set of metal steps is rolled slowly and clankily across the tarmac.

  And then, it begins, the parade Beth has seen so many times before: the marines appearing one by one at the top of the steps. Bodies clad in splattered sand-colored uniforms. Matching rucksacks humping their backs. Eyes scanning the crowd. Young faces wary, eager, and scared all at once—exactly the expression she used to see on Flanner when she picked him up from kindergarten.

  A drip of sweat runs down her back. Her nails dig deeper.

  “Isn’t Dad coming?” Flanner asks after some fifteen men and two women have descended the steps to be embraced and kissed and vacuumed up by their families.

  “Yes, he’s coming. Don’t worry.”

  And finally, there he is. Stepping out of the plane and pausing on the top step like a president: tall, tight-knit, and broad-shouldered. Head shaved. Face bony.

  The families are screeching louder than ever now, jumping up and down, waving their flags and banners. Beth only stands stiff and silent, her eyes fixed on Todd, searching for the man he once was and the man he might be.

  “Home at fucking last” is the first thing he says when he finds them. Scooping Flanner up with one arm, he hugs him so long and tight he squeezes the air out of him. With the other, he pulls Beth into his chest, knocking her nose against the hard plate of his breastbone. “It is so good to be here,” he says hoarsely. “So goddamn good.”

  Face mashed into him, sunglasses knocked askew, she can scarcely breathe. He may be shaven and fresher-looking than he was on Skype, but he reeks of anxious sweat and something else, something metallic and sour. She waits for him to release her, fighting for air against his chest and already feeling in the wrong.

  “Welcome back, honey,” she says with a gasp when he at last lets her go, rescuing her sunglasses from the back of her head. “There’s a celebration for you all at the high school. Interested? Or do you just feel like heading home?”

  He isn’t listening, too busy searching the crowd for his buddies, grinning at them, pulling faces.

  “Todd?” She hears her voice rise high and thin. “Want to go the party or not?”

  He shouts a joke to someone and only then switches his attention back, dropping his eyes over her: hair brushed to curl around her breasts, shirt his favorite cornflower blue and cut low, skirt white and tight, matching heels. “Looking good, babe.” He scans her face. “Tired, though.”

  She glances away. “Where do you want to go?” she asks for the third time. “Welcome party or home?”

  “Home. I’ve had enough of those fucking parties. Just wanna be wi
th you and Flan.”

  Beth, too, has come to dread those celebrations. The marines turning drunk and dangerous. The families trying so hard it hurts. The jealous suspicions clogging the conversation.

  “Okay, let’s get your bags,” she says. “Flanner, come on.”

  Flanner follows them to baggage claim, unable to tear his eyes from his towering platoon sergeant of a dad.

  Once they retrieve Todd’s duffel bag, patterned with the same splatter of brown and tan as his uniform, Beth leads them with mounting dread to the parking lot and over to the white Honda Civic she managed to pry out of the insurance company. “This is us!” she calls, trying to sound chirpy.

  “Where’s my Camaro?” Todd looks about in confusion, his naked head taut and veined.

  “Um, that hurricane we mentioned?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I am. It blew a gigantic branch off the maple and . . . well, it crushed the car. I’m sorry, honey.” She peers into her purse.

  “You’re kidding.” She can feel his eyes on her. “You know what that car meant to me. When was this, a month ago? Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. Please don’t get upset.”

  “And you didn’t think to move it out from under the tree before the hurricane hit?”

  She looks up. “I had the store to close, Todd. And two kids to pick up from camp and get down to the basement. I had a lot to worry about.”

  “So it’s completely fucked? Can’t be salvaged at all?”

  “Afraid not. They took it to the junkyard.”

  Todd rubs his face, and she remembers he is exhausted. “Insurance is covering it, though, right?”

  “Yes. Well, some of it anyhow.”

  “Shitheads! I’ll deal with it then. I’ll call tomorrow and give ’em hell. They damn well better replace that car, or else.”

  “I already did deal with it, Todd. I already gave them hell.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I did! I’ve been doing it all while you’ve been gone, like I always do. I’ve dealt with everything, including the storm damage. I even got the company to cover renting this Honda till the payments come through.”

  “Gimme the fucking keys.” Snatching them from her, he opens the trunk and flings in his bags. She stands there, shocked. In all the fifteen years he’s been in the Corps, he has never spoken to her this roughly before. Never.

  He barely waits for her and Flanner to get in before he takes off with a screech, careening out of the parking lot and down the road as if he were on a racetrack. His neck is running sweat. Jaw clamping and unclamping.

  “Slow down!” she gasps, clutching the dashboard.

  “What?”

  “You’re going too fast! You’ll run into someone!”

  Todd looks at her as though he genuinely has no idea what she is talking about. “Oh,” he says. “Yeah.” And slow down he does.

  As soon as they reach the house, he jumps out of the car and lets himself in, yelling something she misses over his shoulder as he heads for the shower. So she hauls his bags inside for him, lugs them up to their bedroom, and drops them in a corner, where they lie sagging in their war colors: dusty, faded, foreign. She stares at the duffel, its bulk and length reminding her ineluctably of a corpse.

  Down in the kitchen, she has the same meal ready to cook that Todd always wants on his returns: T-bone steak, mashed potatoes, green beans. Red wine, for what he calls her sophisticated streak, but plenty of beer, too. A surprise for dessert.

  As she sets the steak to broil, she tries to ignore the ice seeping under her skin. After all, she has been through Todd’s homecomings before: twice for leave and three times at the end of his previous tours. She knows he is always on edge, teetering between the hostile moonscape of Afghanistan and the tree-cluttered streets of Huntsville, the tight-knit company of his all-male infantry platoon and his demanding family of two—the adrenaline high of war and the dull routine of home. She knows also that he is usually too jet-lagged to finish his first meal, wanting only to shower, drink and collapse. All this she expects, along with the thrashing while he searches for sleep, the night terrors she is determined to endure, the apologies that inevitably follow. Why should this return be any different?

  By the time he emerges, dressed like a frat boy in jeans and a short-sleeved plaid shirt in brown and green, which only make his shaven skull and sunken cheeks look more alien than ever, she has dinner on the dining room table. She set it before he came, with his favorite candy-striped tablecloth and his grandmother’s silver, along with a vase of expensive yellow roses to complement her decor.

  “Wash your hands, Flanner,” she orders, and pulls out the chair at the head of the table with the flourish of the restaurant hostess she once was, trying to clown away her nervousness.

  Todd sits without a word while Flanner runs to the sink, so eager to be at his father’s side he returns with his hands still wet. He takes the chair next to his father while Beth gives Todd his meal first, opening his beer before pouring her own glass of wine. Then she serves Flanner and herself and sits on the other side; a family triumvirate.

  Todd says little while they eat. Asks nothing about their nine months without him, says nothing about his nine without them. Beth watches him, his hefty shoulders hunched over his dinner, his gaze flitting from his plate to the windows and back again, his eyes flat as paint. She wonders how long it will take him this time to truly understand where he is.

  Flanner, meanwhile, is talking nonstop about the summer, his first week in fifth grade, and his new after-school football program. He tells Todd again about the hurricane knocking down all those trees, about the flood rerouting the creek and destroying the clinic—about everything except his loss of Tariq and his encounter with Rin and the wolf, which still fills him with a skin-crawling shame.

  Todd stares at him glassy-eyed, nodding in all the wrong places. Then, with a yawn, he shoves his half-eaten meal away. “This was great, babe, but I can’t stay awake another second.” Picking up his beer, he stands. “Sorry, Flan. We’ll hang tomorrow, okay?”

  “Wait,” Beth says. “Honey, just wait a sec. We’ve got a surprise. Flan?”

  Todd sits back down.

  Flanner runs to the kitchen and comes back bearing the cake he and Beth baked that afternoon: a heavy, lopsided chocolate layer as big as his chest, adorned with Marine green frosting Flanner made himself and his carefully chosen words, WELCOME HOME DAD. Semper Fi.

  He places it in front of Todd with a shy smile and stands beside him.

  Todd peers down at it. “Green? Are you kidding?”

  “Flanner made that specially for you.” Beth gives Todd a pained look. He ignores her, pushing the cake aside and downing a long slug of beer. He stretches his big arms above his head with a second loud yawn. The skin under his left bicep is newly tattooed with a spread-winged eagle perched on a globe and the logo USMC. Beth wonders how many other new tattoos he has acquired since she last saw him. His back and chest, shoulders and upper arms are already a gallery of military symbols, American flags, and weapons. Tucked just above the inside of his right elbow is the iconic crossed-out eyes and smiley face of Nirvana.

  “Flan, I couldn’t eat that now if you paid me,” he says once the yawn is finished. “But tell you what. Stick it in the fridge so this summer heat don’t ruin it and we’ll make it a midnight snack. Okay? I’ll come wake you up. Special treat.”

  The tightness in Beth’s throat eases a little, as does the misery in Flanner’s face. “That’d be great, Dad!”

  “Good. Come here, sport.” Todd gives Flanner a squeeze. “I missed you so much, know that? So what d’you wanna do tomorrow, huh? Go fishing? I been waiting a long time to go fishing. Or practice some of that catching we were talking about?”

  “Both!” Flanner says happily.

  “Cool. Go get my rucksack. I got something in there for you.”

  While Flanner is upstairs,
Todd leans forward and finally rests his eyes on Beth. “How’s he been doing?”

  “So-so.” She decides not to mention the shoe scuffs she had to scrub off the wall. The shoes all over the hallways. The slap. She lowers her voice. “Tariq stopped playing with him, though.”

  “Why?” Todd sits back, brow knotting.

  She is about to explain Naema’s near drowning when Flanner reappears, gripping his father’s bulky rucksack. “Here,” he says with a grunt, heaving it onto Todd’s lap.

  “No, you open it. Look for the plastic bag.”

  Flanner thumps the rucksack onto the floor and struggles with its straps a moment. Inside, he finds a new baseball mitt, supple and leather and just the right size for his hand. He looks up, flushing with pleasure.

  “We’ll break it in tomorrow, deal?” Todd says.

  “Deal! Can we play down in the park?”

  Todd pats him on the back. “Sure thing, sport. But now it’s time for you to scoot. Off you go to bed.”

  The pleasure fades. “But Dad, it’s only six. It’s still daytime. Look.” Flanner points at the sunlight filling the picture windows around the room. “I can’t go to bed now.”

  “Then watch TV or whatever the fuck you do with yourself these days. I need some time alone with your mom.”

  Flanner scowls and hangs his head. “Why’d you want to be with her? She’s useless.”

  “Flanner—” Beth begins, but Todd interrupts.

  “I said go to bed.”

  “But Dad, she never helps me with homework or plays ball with me or takes me anyplace anymore!”

  Todd turns his desiccated face from Flanner to Beth and back again. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s true!” Flanner yells. “All she ever does is sit around getting drunk as a pig!”

  “Flanner!” Beth gasps.

  Todd grips Flanner’s stick of an arm. “You don’t talk like that about your mom, understand? Ever! Now haul your ass upstairs and not another word.”