“Oooh, Junie. This is a lovely painting of the two of you.”
I nodded.
“You both look so . . . grown up. So wise.”
I nodded again.
“And beautiful. Pretty as, well, as a picture.” Mrs. Lester giggled. “We’ve got the big copier down here now. I can get most of this page all on one sheet of paper.”
“Great,” I said. I must have looked anxious, because Mrs. Lester scuttled off behind the counter double quick. When she came back out, she was holding two copies of the article.
“Oh, I only need one.”
“I know, hon’, but we need one for the board.”
“The board?”
“The display board. You and Greta are famous. You’re a work of art. It’s nice to have a little bit of local celebrity around here. If you’ve got it—”
“No. Really, no. We—neither of us likes a lot of attention.”
“I insist. June, you’ve been discovered. Don’t hide your light and all that.”
I knew that the only way to prevent Mrs. Lester from hanging up the article would be to tell her that the painting was by my uncle Finn who had just died of AIDS and that my whole family was a little bit touchy about the subject. Hearing the word AIDS would probably be enough for Mrs. Lester, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand there and pretend to be embarrassed about Finn.
I took my copy, folding it so the picture was on the inside, and went back upstairs, into the browns and grays of the main library. I walked to the display board to see if there might be a way to pull the article down once she’d put it up. When nobody was looking. But it was impossible. All the notices were behind a locked glass sliding door.
I took the copy of the article into the woods. I folded it small so it fit in my coat pocket, and I walked until I could hear the wolves. There wasn’t much more about Finn, just this:
“This Old Man,” the last painting sold by Weiss and possibly his most well known, is a self-portrait of the artist wearing a baggy woolen jacket over a bare torso. He is holding out an oversized human heart to a pool of crocodiles. Across the artist’s chest is a jaggedly healed scar that reads EMPTY. It’s the sincerity of the gesture that moves the viewer. There is no irony, only the feeling that you are witnessing the very moment before he will release the wet beating thing in his hand and the sense that you have truly received everything this artist has to give. The painting sold for more than $200,000 at auction in 1979. According to Sotheby’s, “Tell the Wolves I’m Home” could fetch upwards of $700,000.
I guess that should have been a big deal to me, that the painting was worth a fortune, but it wasn’t. We’d never sell it, so it didn’t really matter. What did catch my eye was that there were no buttons. In the paper my T-shirt was plain, just a plain black T-shirt with no buttons at all.
When I got home, the portrait wasn’t hanging over the mantel anymore. My parents had put the painting back in a black garbage bag and driven it down to the Bank of New York and got them to put it in a vault somewhere in the basement of the bank. I thought of our faces, mine and Greta’s, staring out into that dark vault. And I thought that at least I wasn’t alone in there. Even being with Greta was better than being alone in such a dark dark place.
Eighteen
My parents specialize in doing the books for restaurants. That’s why the Elbus family gets free meals in places all over Westchester. We get a table even when there’s a line to get in. I guess that should make me feel like someone famous, but actually it has the opposite effect. It’s obvious that we’re regular people, so it just looks like we’re jerks who are cutting in front of everyone else. Even Greta thinks it’s embarrassing. And my father. It’s only my mother who likes that little bit of celebrity once in a while.
Between the funeral and tax season and Greta’s rehearsals, we’d missed my father’s birthday dinner completely. Almost a month had gone by since his birthday. My mother finally put her foot down and said she didn’t care that it was a Tuesday in the middle of tax season. We’d put his birthday dinner off long enough and that was that.
He chose Gasho of Japan, which was perfect because my parents don’t do its books and also because, if you’re in the right mood, Gasho is a very cool restaurant. The person who started it took apart a whole sixteenth-century farmhouse in Japan, brought all the pieces to America, and rebuilt them and turned the place into a restaurant. The chefs cook on hot grills that are right in the middle of the tables, and in the back there’s a Japanese garden with a stream and arched bridges and benches that nestle in peaceful little corners.
If you’re in the right mood, it’s a good place to go. But nobody was really in the right mood.
The thing was, Finn always came out to dinner with us on our birthdays. Always. Sometimes we would go into the city and Finn would arrange it. Other times he would come up here. This was the first birthday he wouldn’t be there. My mother tried to suggest that we ask the Ingrams instead, but nobody thought that was a good idea. Not even Greta.
“Lookin’ good, girls,” my dad said as we climbed into the van. Greta and I glanced at each other for a second, then we both rolled our eyes.
Greta sat in the row of seats in front of me, in a pair of pinstripe jeans with holes in the knees. I wore a black skirt and a giant sweater. I didn’t wear my boots from Finn. I couldn’t bear to wear those boots that night.
The drive to Gasho was quiet except for the sound of my father’s Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits cassette. All my parents’ music came from greatest hits albums. It was like the thought of getting even one bum track was too much for them to handle. As we drove down the highway, I thought of all the other birthdays we’d celebrated. My dad’s thirty-fifth, in that dark Moroccan place Finn knew in the Village. Greta’s tenth where we got Il Vecchio to write Happy Birthday, Greta in peppers on top of all the pizzas. My twelfth, when Finn reserved a dining room in an old hotel and made us all play these Victorian parlor games he’d read about. He showed up in a top hat and tails and spoke in an English accent the whole time. By the end of the night we were all talking like that. Even Greta. It was all “pardon” and “would you mind terribly much” and “swimmingly” and finding excuses to call each other cads and bounders.
Then there was my mother’s fortieth, with me sitting next to Finn at this fancy restaurant that had a jazz piano player in one corner and candles in these thick square glass candleholders on the tables. I was ten and Greta was twelve, and I watched the candlelight flickering against my mother’s cheek as she peeled back the wrapping paper from Finn’s present. That was something about a present from Finn. You always kept the wrapping paper because it was always more beautiful than any you’d ever seen. That particular wrapping paper was a deep dark red that looked like it was made of real velvet. My mother opened it slowly, careful not to tear the paper, and then, when she had one side open, she gently slid out a black sketchbook.
That sketchbook ended up on a bookshelf in Greta’s room. Inside, Finn had written a little note that said, You know you want to . . . next to a tiny pen sketch of my mother with a pencil in her hand. What was amazing was that even though the sketch was only half an inch high, you could tell instantly that it was my mother. That’s how good Finn was.
That night everyone else was talking. My dad was having a quiet argument with Greta because she didn’t want to put her napkin on her lap. The whole time, Finn sat next to me, folding and twisting his napkin until all at once he lifted it out from under the table and we saw that he’d folded it into a butterfly. We watched as he flew it over to Greta and said, “Here, I have somebody who needs a lap to rest on.” Greta giggled and took the butterfly from Finn’s hand and put it straight on her lap, and my dad looked over at Finn and gave him a smile. I remember thinking that I wanted a butterfly napkin too. I wanted Finn to fold something for me. I was about to ask him, but when I turned I saw that he was staring across the table at my mother. She had the sketchbook open to the inside cover a
nd she was gazing down at that little drawing of herself. After a while she looked up at Finn. She lifted her head slowly, and she didn’t smile or say thank you like you normally would if somebody gave you a present. No. She just sat there, giving him a kind of sad, hard look then shook her head at him, her lips pressed together tight. Then she slid the book back into the wrapping paper and shoved it under the table. That’s one of those snapshot moments. I don’t know why some memories are like that, where everything is perfectly preserved. Frozen. But that memory—Finn’s eyes locked on my mother’s, my mother slowly shaking her head—is exactly like that.
When we got to Gasho, we followed the hostess to one of the high tables and climbed onto our stools. Each table seated maybe twelve people around a big grill, and the chef was at the other end hacking up some meat with a little hatchet. My dad ordered two glasses of Japanese beer. Then he looked at us and asked if we wanted Shirley Temples.
“I’m not, like, three years old, you know,” Greta said. “I’ll have a Diet Coke.”
“I guess I’ll have a Coke too,” I said, even though really I would have liked a Shirley Temple.
And that’s about the most conversation we had all night. I don’t think anybody in that restaurant would have been able to guess that we were out having a birthday celebration. My dad asked Greta how the play was going, and all she could say was “Fine.” My mother remarked on a change in the menu, but that’s as good as it got. None of us were Finn sort of people. I tried to remember one of the Victorian games, but nothing came to me. Maybe more was said, maybe some words disappeared into the sizzling peppers and onions, but that’s how I remember it. I sat there watching the Japanese chef with his high white hat frying our dinner and wondered what would happen to me without Finn. Would I stay stupid for the rest of my life? Who would tell me the truth, the real story that was under what everybody else could see? How do you become someone who knows those things? How do you become someone with X-ray vision? How do you become Finn?
On the way home, I thought about the note from Toby again. I thought about how March 6 was only three days away and how stupid it would be for me to go meet him. Again I thought that I should go to my parents and tell them all about it. Tell them that this guy came right up to our door. That he’d asked me to meet him. That he’d asked me to keep it a secret. It wasn’t too late to tell them everything.
My parents trusted me. I knew they did. And they were right to. I was a girl who always did the right thing. But this was different. I knew Toby had stories. He had little pieces of Finn I’d never seen. And the apartment. Maybe there would be a chance to see the apartment again. My mother would call it scraping the bottom of the barrel. Looking for the very last crumbs. My mother would call it being greedy, but I didn’t care. If you think a story can be like a kind of cement, the sloppy kind that you put between bricks, the kind that looks like cake frosting before it dries hard, then maybe I thought it would be possible to use what Toby had to hold Finn together, to keep him here with me a little bit longer.
Nineteen
“Party. Tomorrow night. One hundred percent. No cancellations.”
Greta had come into the bathroom while I was in the shower and whispered through the coral pink shower curtain.
“What?”
Greta said it again, slower, as loud as she could without our parents hearing. I still couldn’t hear her right, so I turned the shower off and rubbed the water out of my ears with my palm. I stuck my head out from behind the curtain.
“What?”
She let out a frustrated breath, then said it one more time. That time I heard her.
“Mom and Dad will be at work until seven and then we can just tell them you’re helping with the play again. Okay?”
I nodded, but my thoughts were racing. The party was the same day as the meeting with Toby.
“Okay?” Greta said.
“Yeah . . . I guess. Okay.”
“It’s in the woods behind the school.”
My woods. The party was going to be in my woods. I smiled to myself. For once I’d know more than Greta. I’d be the only one there who knew anything about the place.
Greta stood there with her hands on her hips, looking at me like she was waiting for me to say something. “You know those woods, right?”
“I . . . yeah. The ones you can see behind the cafeteria.”
She waited another few seconds, then nodded.
I turned the shower on to full again, letting it pound against my neck.
I could see the shape of Greta’s forehead through the shower curtain, and I gave her a poke. She poked back, trying to nab my shoulder. We both laughed, poking blindly at each other through the pink plastic.
“Stop,” Greta said, but she was still poking.
I reached a wet arm out from the side of the curtain and tickled Greta right under her armpit. We both couldn’t stop laughing.
“Girls?” My dad’s voice boomed from downstairs.
I pulled my arm back.
“It’s okay,” Greta hollered.
Every once in a while it was like that with me and Greta. Just for a minute or two. Just a glimpse of what we used to be like.
She stuck her head around the curtain, angling her face so she wouldn’t see me naked.
“So you’re still coming?”
“Yeah. Just go ahead. I’ll meet you in the woods.”
Twenty
I wrote down some ways to hate Toby. I wanted to be prepared. I didn’t want to show up all weepy and dumb. I wanted to be hard. I wanted to be able to tell him what was what.
1) Remember that he is the one who made Finn die. Maybe on purpose.
2) Remember that he is the one who sent the portrait, OUR portrait, to the paper without asking, even though it’s ours and it’s none of his business.
3) Remember that only someone very creepy would send a fourteen-year-old girl letters and tell her not to tell her parents.
I looked at the list, but I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t seem to hate the guy. Finn didn’t hate Toby. Finn might have even loved Toby. And Toby was probably the very last person in the world who’d talked to Finn, who’d seen him alive. So I added this:
4) Toby was the last one to talk to Finn. Toby was the last one to hold Finn’s hand. The last one to hug him. Not me. It was Toby.
That’s when the list started working. I wanted to be the last one. Not some gangly English guy with a watery voice.
Twenty-One
If you stand on Sumac Avenue where it bridges over the train tracks and look out over the railing, you can see the whole train station platform. I turned up late, and I was freezing cold because I’d stuffed my stupid light blue puffy coat in my backpack. I’d taken the long way, up past the bike shop and the Mobil station and then across the weedy fields near the Lutheran church. As I got closer, I started to think that maybe Toby himself wouldn’t show up. Maybe he would hide somewhere and watch and wait to see if I would come, just like I’d decided I was going to do to him.
I peered over the edge of the railing, trying not to get too close. I wasn’t sure I would even recognize him, but I did. I saw him right away. He was sitting on a bench at the far end of the platform, his knees pulled up to his chest, his fingers fidgeting with his shoelaces. I could see that he was skinny, but not exactly in an AIDS way. He didn’t look the way Finn did at the end. He looked like he’d always been like that.
I stood for a while, watching him. Every now and then he snapped his head up and looked around. Almost like he was spooked. Like he could tell I was there somewhere. Each time he did that, I jumped back out of his line of sight.
Toby looked younger than Finn. Younger than my mother or father. If I had to guess, I would have said he was around thirty, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. From where I was I could see his skinny neck and his oversize Adam’s apple poking out; his hair looked soft, like baby bird feathers dusted over his head. Toby stood up and paced down the platform. He wore a
small blue backpack and he had on jeans and sneakers and a thick gray sweater with a red woolen scarf, but no coat. He didn’t seem like anything special, and I wondered why someone like Finn would go out with him. He stared down the track, then glanced at his watch. I heard the noise of the train edging in.
Toby peeked down at his watch again, and then, before I had time to think, he looked right up to the spot where I was standing. I jumped back before he saw me, and right then I decided I wouldn’t go down there. I wouldn’t meet Toby after all. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What would I say? No. I wouldn’t go down. I’d watch from above. I’d wait for the train to take him away. He’d get the message.
I inched back to my place and peered down. What I saw was Toby, looking straight back up at me, staring right at my spot. One hand was shading his eyes, and when he saw me he spread the fingers of his other hand and raised them in the smallest of waves. Before I could decide not to, I did the same. I edged a hand barely above the top of the railing and spread my fingers.
Then I smiled. It was only the barest of smiles, and it came out without me wanting it to. I don’t know how I could have smiled at the man who killed Finn, but I did, and that seemed to seal something. It felt like that smile had locked me in, like it was some kind of promise that made it so I had no choice but to walk down that flight of steps to the platform.
Toby kept staring up at me with a sort of worried look. The way the light was pouring down on his face, the way his hand stayed raised, made it look like he was in a medieval painting, shielding his eyes from something bigger than himself. He pointed to the platform and nodded his head downward. And before I could stop myself, I was nodding back and walking to the covered stairway. It felt like I was moving in slow motion. Like the stairs might keep going down and down forever.
Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel Page 8
