Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  I picked up the phone and dialed his number, which I knew by heart. It rang twice before it was answered, and when I heard the click of someone picking up, a flood of joy spread right through my chest.

  “Finn?” It was quiet on the other end and I waited. “Finn?” I said again. I could hear the desperation creeping into my voice.

  “I’m . . . I’m afraid not. He’s not . . .”

  I hung up the phone quick. The voice was the same. It was the same man who’d left the message on our machine.

  I ran up to my room. It had never seemed so small. So shrunk down. I looked around at my stupid fake candles and my big dumb collection of Choose Your Own Adventure books, my gaudy red comforter with the fake tapestry print on it. The city seemed like it was a thousand miles away. Like without Finn it didn’t have the weight to stay put. Like it might just float away.

  I crawled under my bed and closed my eyes tight. I stayed under there for two hours, breathing in stale stew, pretending to be something ancient and entombed, listening for the back door to open so I could press my hands tight over my ears before I had to hear someone playing that stupid answering machine message again.

  Five

  What Greta said—that she knew about Finn being sick before I did—was probably true. She wasn’t there when I found out. The day I found out, I was supposed to be going to the dentist with my mother, but then, without saying a word, she turned left on Main instead of right and the next thing I knew we were at the Mount Kisco Diner. I should have known something was weird about the whole thing from the start, because Greta and I always went to the dentist together and that time it was just my mother and me. Maybe she was hoping I’d be so relieved not to be going to the dentist that the news about Finn wouldn’t seem so bad. She was wrong about that. I like going to the dentist. I like the way the fluoride gel tastes, and I like that for the twenty minutes I’m sitting in Dr. Shippee’s chair, my teeth are the most important thing in the world to him.

  We sat in a booth, which meant we had a jukebox. Before I even asked, my mother passed me a quarter and told me to pick some songs.

  “Something good, okay?” she said. “Something happy.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what we were about to talk about, so I chose “Ghostbusters,” “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and “99 Luftballons.” The jukebox had both the English and the German versions of that song. I chose the German because I thought it was cooler.

  My mother ordered a cup of coffee, no food. I ordered lemon meringue pie and chocolate milk.

  “Ghostbusters” started to play as I flipped through the jukebox songs. I turned the pages, reading the titles one by one, wondering if I’d made the best choices. Then my mother’s hand was suddenly on top of mine.

  “June,” she said, looking like she was almost going to cry.

  “Yeah?”

  She said something so softly I couldn’t hear any of it.

  “What?” I asked, leaning across the table.

  She said it again, but I could only see her lips moving, like she wasn’t even trying to make herself heard.

  I shook my head. The jukebox blared out Ray Parker Jr. singing about how he wasn’t afraid of ghosts.

  My mother pointed to the space next to her, and I walked around to her side of the table. She took my head in her hands and pulled me in so her mouth was almost touching my ear.

  “Finn’s dying, June.”

  She could have said that Finn was sick—even really sick—but she didn’t. She told me straight out that Finn was dying. My mother wasn’t always like that. She wasn’t usually one for harsh truths, but this time she must have figured it would mean less talking, less explaining. Because how could she possibly explain something like this? How could anyone? She pulled me closer and we stayed like that for a few seconds, neither of us wanting to look the other in the eye. It felt like there was a traffic jam in my brain. A hundred different things I was supposed to say.

  “Lemon meringue?”

  The waitress was suddenly standing there holding out my pie, and I had to pull away and nod. I looked at that ridiculous fluffy cheerful meringue and couldn’t believe that only a few minutes ago I was a girl who would have wanted something like that.

  “What kind of dying?” was what I finally said.

  I watched as my mother traced her index finger against the table. AIDS, she wrote. Then, as though the table was a blackboard, as though it could remember what she’d written, she rubbed it out with the flat of her hand.

  “Oh.” I got up and went back to my side of the table. The pie sat there taunting me. I stabbed my fork into that stupid hopeful meringue and pulled it apart. Then I slid closer to the jukebox and pressed my ear against the speaker. I closed my eyes and tried to make the whole diner disappear. As “99 Luftballons” started up, I sat there waiting for Nena to say “Captain Kirk,” the two words in that whole song I understood.

  Six

  The coffin wasn’t open at Finn’s funeral, and everyone was grateful for that. Especially me. I’d been imagining his closed eyes. His thin-skinned eyelids. I’d been wondering how I would stop myself from laying gentle fingers against them and sliding them open. Just to see Finn’s blue eyes one more time.

  The funeral was exactly a week after the phone call. It was a Thursday, and we were missing the afternoon of school for it. I was pretty sure that was the only reason Greta agreed to come. This was also one of the few days in my life that I’d ever seen both my parents off on the same day during a tax season.

  My mother brought along the portrait Finn had painted of the two of us, because she thought it might be a nice thing to put up somewhere to show the kind of man Finn had been, but when we got to the parking lot of the funeral home she changed her mind.

  “He’s here,” she said. Her voice was a strange combination of anger and panic.

  My father parked the car and looked out the window. “Where?”

  “Right there, can’t you see him? On his own, on the side there.”

  My father nodded, and I looked too. There was a man sitting hunched on a low brick wall. A tall skinny guy who reminded me of Ichabod Crane from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

  “Who is it?” I asked, pointing out the window.

  My mother and father both turned to look at me in the backseat. Greta elbowed me in the ribs and said, “Shut up,” in her meanest voice.

  “You shut up,” I said.

  “I’m not the one asking stupid questions.” She straightened her glasses, then looked away.

  “Quiet. Both of you,” my father said. “This is hard enough for your mother.”

  It’s hard for me too, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I kept quiet, knowing that the sadness I was feeling was the wrong kind of sadness for a niece. Knowing that Finn wasn’t really mine to be that kind of sad over. Now that he was dead, he belonged to my mother and my grandmother. They were the ones people felt bad for even though it seemed like neither of them were even that close to him. To everyone at Finn’s funeral, I was just the niece. I stared out the car window and understood that I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit. Nobody had any idea how many minutes of each day I spent thinking about Finn, and, thankfully, nobody had any idea exactly what kind of thoughts they were.

  My mother had arranged for the funeral to be held at a funeral home in our town instead of in the city, where all of Finn’s friends lived. There was no argument about it. It felt like she was trying to gather him up. Like she was trying to keep Finn all to herself.

  My father looked over at my mother. “So, should I leave it in the trunk?”

  She nodded, her lips pressed together tight. “Just leave it.”

  In the end it had been my dad who drove down to the city to pick up the portrait the day after Finn died. He went at night, and none of us offered to go with him. My mother had a key to the apartment, which Finn had threaded onto a piece of red silk ribbon. We’d had that key for years, but I’m not sure
anybody had ever used it. My mother always said it was a “just in case” kind of thing. Something Finn wanted us to have.

  My dad didn’t get home until late that night. He banged the door coming in, and even I overheard him and my mother talking.

  “Was he there?” she said.

  “Danni—”

  “Was he?”

  “Of course he was there.”

  I thought I could hear my mother crying then.

  “God. Just thinking about him . . . You’d think things would turn out a little bit fair. Just a little bit.”

  “Shhhh. Danni, you have to let it go.”

  “I won’t. I can’t.” There was quiet, then, “Well, where is it anyway? You did get it, right?”

  He must have nodded, because the painting was on the table in a black garbage bag the next morning. I was the first one up and I found it there looking like nothing special. I circled the table once, then reached out to touch the bag. I pressed my nose against the outside, searching for a scent of Finn’s, but there was nothing. I opened the bag and stuck my head inside, breathing in deep, but the chemical plastic smell smothered anything that might have been wound up in the canvas. I closed my eyes and breathed harder, slower, tightening the bag around my neck.

  “Hey, dorkus.” I felt a slap land hard across my back. Greta. I pulled free from the bag.

  “I won’t stop you if you want to end it all, just let us keep the painting, okay? It’s gross enough without another dead-body story all over it.”

  Dead body. Finn was a dead body.

  “Girls?” My mother stood halfway down the stairs, pulling her pink quilted robe around herself. She squinted at us through sleepy eyes. “You’re not messing around with that painting, are you?”

  We both shook our heads. Then Greta smiled.

  “One of us has been trying to commit suicide with the garbage bag, that’s all.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up, Greta,” I said, but she couldn’t. She could never shut up.

  “Found her down here with her head halfway in that bag.”

  My mother came over and hugged me so tight I thought she might suffocate me. Then she held me away from her.

  “I know how you felt about Finn, and I want you to know, Junie, anytime, anytime you need to talk—”

  “I was not trying to kill myself.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything. We’re all here. Me, your father, Greta. We all love you.” Behind my mother, Greta goggled her eyes at me and mimed hanging herself with a noose.

  There was no point arguing, so I just nodded and sat down at the table.

  My mother picked up the plastic bag and took it upstairs. She said we needed a break from the portrait for a while and that she was putting it someplace safe. That was the last I saw of it until the day of the funeral.

  Now we walked up the path toward the front door, Greta and I falling behind our parents. My father stopped and put a hand on my mother’s arm.

  “Go on ahead,” he said, pointing up toward the front steps. “Go find your mother. See how she is.”

  My mother nodded. She was wearing her nice black wool coat over a narrow black skirt with a dark gray blouse, and she had on a little black hat with a veil. She looked good, like she always did. It was snowing lightly, and the snowflakes kept landing and sitting on the top of her hat for a few seconds before they melted into the black felt.

  My grandmother was in the entrance hall, talking to someone I didn’t know. She was nothing like my mother, but that was the story of the Weiss side of the family. It seemed like Finn and my mother had looked at their parents and decided that, no matter what, they did not want to turn out like them. So there’s Grandpa Weiss, who was a big army guy, and then there’s Finn, who went off to become an artist. And there’s Grandma Weiss, who spent her whole life cooking meals and ironing clothes and getting her hair done for Grandpa Weiss, and then along comes my mother, who would pay anything not to have to iron or cook real food, who cropped her hair short so she wouldn’t have to worry about doing anything with it. If the trend continues with Greta and me, that would mean neither of us would ever want to work in an office, which so far was true for me. If things went my way, I would be working at a renaissance fair as a falconer. I wouldn’t have to worry about climbing career ladders or getting promotions, because falconry’s not like that. Either you’re a falconer or you’re not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away.

  My father waited until my mother walked into the funeral parlor. Then he turned to the two of us. I noticed a thin strip of bristle along his jawline, where he’d missed shaving, and I noticed that his brow was constantly furrowed that day. Like a juggler who had to concentrate too hard to keep all the balls in the air. He didn’t seem sad about Finn dying. If anything, I thought, he acted like it was a relief.

  “I want you two to tell me if you see that man come in, okay?”

  We both nodded.

  “For your mother’s and your grandmother’s sake, got it?”

  We nodded again.

  “Good girls. I know this is rough, and you’re both doing a great job.” He squeezed my shoulder, then Greta’s. “Things will settle down after this, okay?” We nodded once more. He looked at us for another second, then turned to jog up to the open front door.

  Greta and I stood there on the ice-crusted front path. Sometimes it felt really obvious that I was taller than Greta even though she was older than me. I leaned in to her and nodded my head toward the man.

  “Who is he anyway?” I whispered. I was almost certain she wasn’t going to tell me, and I was right. She said nothing, just gestured for me to walk down the path toward where he stood. I glanced up and saw that he was staring right at me. Not at Greta. Only me. He leaned forward like he was about to stand up, like he thought I was coming over to greet him. I was about to turn and walk back the other way, but Greta laid a hand on my arm and pulled me on. We walked until we were maybe a room’s length away from the man. Then Greta stopped, waited a second, and cleared her throat.

  “He’s one of those people who weren’t invited to this funeral,” she said, loud enough for him to hear.

  I looked over at the man who a second ago had seemed to be trying to catch my eye, but now he’d looked away. He’d plunged his hands into his pockets and was staring down at the sidewalk.

  “What’d you say that for?”

  “I’m not telling you a thing,” she said.

  The reason Greta knows things that I don’t is because she spies. There are places in our house where you can hear everything. I hate those places, but Greta loves them. Her favorite is the downstairs bathroom because hardly anybody uses it, so nobody remembers someone is in there. Even if you are noticed, you can shout out, “Just a minute,” before unlocking the door to let someone in. By that time you’ve heard everything.

  I don’t like to overhear things, because, in my experience, things your parents are keeping quiet about are things you don’t want to know. It doesn’t feel good to know that your grandparents are getting separated because your grandfather lost his temper and gave your grandmother a slap across the face after fifty-two years of being married with no problems at all. It doesn’t feel good to know ahead of time what you’ll be getting for Christmas or birthdays so that you have to act surprised even though you’re a terrible liar. It doesn’t feel good to know that your teacher told your mother at a conference that you’re an average student in math and English and that you should be happy with that.

  Greta raced ahead to the door of the funeral home. When she got there, she stopped and turned around.

  “On second thought,” she said in a loud clear voice. “On second thought, I will tell you.” She wiped melted snow off her cheek with the back of her hand.

  I felt cold and sick. It was always the same with Greta’s information. I wanted to know, but I was scared to know. I gave her the very slightest tip of my head.

  Sh
e pointed to the man and said, “He’s the guy who killed Uncle Finn.”

  I twisted my head back to look at him, but he’d already turned to go. All I saw was a tall skinny man crouching to get into his small blue car.

  I sat in the front row during the funeral service, trying to listen to all the nice things people had to say about Finn. It was stuffy in that room, and dim, and the chairs were the kind that forced you to sit up straighter than you wanted to. Greta didn’t sit up front with us. She said she wanted to sit in the back row, and when I turned to glance at her I saw that her head was down, her hands were over her ears, and her eyes were closed. Not just closed but squeezed tight, like she was trying to shut the whole thing out. For a second I thought she might have even been crying, but that didn’t seem likely.

  My mother gave a short speech about Finn and her as kids. About what a good brother he’d been. Everything she said was vague, like the details might stab her if they got too sharp. After my mother, a cousin from Pennsylvania said a few words. Then the funeral director babbled on for a little while. I tried to listen, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the man outside.

  I didn’t want to think about how Finn got AIDS. It wasn’t my job to think about that. If that guy was really the one who killed Finn, then he must have been Finn’s boyfriend, and if he was Finn’s boyfriend, then why didn’t I know anything about him? And how did Greta know? If she’d known Finn had a secret boyfriend, she would have taunted me about it. She never missed an opportunity to let me know I knew less than she did. So there were two possibilities. Either she just found out about this guy or none of it was true.

  I decided to believe the second one. It’s hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another. Usually a mind makes itself up on its own. But I forced myself, because the idea that Finn would keep such a big secret from me made me want to throw up.

  The service ended and everyone filed out of the building. A few people stopped to talk in the entry hall, but I went straight out the door and tried to find the little blue car. There was no sign of it. Or the man. The snow had started to come down harder, turning the streets and lawns white and perfect. I zipped my coat up as high as it would go, then I looked down the road in both directions, but there was nothing to see. He was gone.