Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “Awesome,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I convinced you to go find the wolves.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course I did. You have, like, no experience points.”

  I stood there for a few seconds, wondering whether I should turn back. What I really wanted to do was leave. But I couldn’t see Greta near the fire anymore, and if I left, if I went home alone, Greta would be in for it. I wouldn’t do that to her.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Let’s go.” I pointed in the wrong direction, away from where I knew the wolves were, and we walked. Ben talked on and on about D&D and quests and his favorite parts of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Once in a while we’d stop and Ben would pull out another can of beer from his coat pocket and we’d sit. I wouldn’t say that I was exactly enjoying myself, but it was nice. Easy. It made the party seem okay.

  I led Ben in a big circle, so eventually we ended up back on the hill above the fire.

  “So, no wolves,” he said. He put his hand on my back.

  He was the second person in one day who was not from my family to touch me on purpose, and it felt strange. Like he was made of different stuff than I was.

  “Guess not.” I took a step forward so his hand fell away. Then I smiled and said, “Doesn’t mean they don’t exist, right?”

  He started to argue, but I was already jogging down the hill to the fire. It was still glowing when I got back down, smoking from the leaves people were piling on it. There was a kind of yeasty smell from the half-full beer cans, and even though it seemed pretty early, kids were starting to leave. Nobody wanted to push their luck at home. I scanned the faces. I didn’t know how much time had gone by, but it was long enough that I expected to see Greta back there. But she wasn’t. I saw her friends, but she was nowhere.

  I stood there with no idea what to do. The weight of my backpack strained against my shoulders, and all I could think of was how much I just wanted to go home. I wanted to count out the money from Toby. I wanted to spread out everything from that crumpled brown paper bag on my bedroom floor. I wanted to sleep. All I needed was Greta.

  I asked around if anyone had seen her, but nobody had. One girl said she thought she’d gone off with Rob Jordan, but she wasn’t sure.

  I didn’t think Greta would leave me. Not this time. This time she’d be in big trouble if she came home without me.

  A bunch of kids made their way toward the school. Ben was with them, and he shouted over, “You okay?”

  I nodded and waved. “Fine.”

  He waved back, then disappeared into the trees.

  Only a few kids still sat around the fire. My eyes were burning from the smoke, and I was thirsty and hungry. I took a few steps back into the dark and, without even trying, I felt like a poor peasant girl from the Middle Ages. A girl out in the woods, desperate to find her only sister.

  “Greta,” I whispered under the dark branches. “Come on, Greta, just tell me where you are.”

  I walked down the hill, away from the school and the fire, until I was next to the brook. I kept calling Greta’s name. Soft and then louder, listening for any kind of response, but the only sounds I heard were above me. An owl in the branches or twigs falling. I followed the brook deeper into the woods, the same way I did when I came by myself. There was only the thinnest scrap of moon that night, but I wasn’t scared. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t scared at all.

  I remembered the flashlight and flicked it on, shouting out Greta’s name.

  “Come out. It’s not funny.”

  At first I worried about finding her with some boy. Doing things I supposedly couldn’t even imagine. I thought how embarrassing that would be for both of us—all three of us even—but I didn’t care anymore. My toes were going numb from cold and I needed to go home.

  I kept following the brook, because I didn’t know what else to do. I almost turned back, but I kept telling myself, Just another few steps, thinking maybe that was all it would take. I scanned the ground with my light as I walked. I picked up the shine of a beer can and once a set of keys, which I put in my pocket. And I kept calling out Greta’s name, louder each time. Maybe she was gone. Maybe she’d forgotten about me altogether.

  That’s when the flashlight glinted off something at the base of a big tree. I looked around. This was my tree. The maple. And there was the old stone wall. I was in my place. For a second it was a comfort to be there, but then it quickly faded, because at night there was nothing special about it. Nothing medieval. It was nothing but cold and dark.

  I angled the light at the glinting spot on the ground and walked toward it, thinking it was probably a broken beer bottle, but when I got up close I could see that the light was reflecting off a pair of glasses. The glasses were on a face. Greta’s muddy face. Just her face on the forest floor, her shiny black hair pulled back tight and those round silver-framed glasses. Her eyes were closed, and for that first second my body went rigid, because I really thought it was only her head laid down on the bed of leaves.

  “Greta.”

  I reached out for her, and right away I could feel her body, buried under a thick pile of cold damp leaves. It looked like the earth was her bed and she’d pulled up the forest floor all around her like a comforter. She looked peaceful, like she belonged in that place. If I wasn’t her sister and if it wasn’t so cold, I might have left her there, thinking she knew exactly what she was doing. I gave her a shake and she curled into herself.

  “Greta, come on. Get up.” I sat her up and leaned her against my arm. I pushed the soggy leaves off her chest and tried to shake her awake.

  She let out a groan and tried to lie back down, but I held her tight.

  I looked behind me and couldn’t see even the faintest glow from the fire anymore. Someone must have put it out. Everyone must have left. There was only Greta and me.

  I shoved Greta’s dirty glasses and the flashlight into my pocket and one more time I tried to wake her. I shook her by the shoulders and shouted, “Greta. Michelle. Elbus. Wake. Up.”

  Her eyes fluttered and she twitched her shoulders to push my hands away.

  Usually I would give anything to shrink, to be small and graceful like Greta, but on that night, under that nearly moonless sky, I was glad to have strength and size. I dragged her to the tree trunk and propped her up in a sit against it. I slung my backpack onto one shoulder. Then I crouched down in front of her, my back to her belly, and stretched her arms around my neck.

  “One . . . two . . . three,” I said, then leaned forward and teetered to standing. Her fingers were weak, drunk person’s fingers, so I stayed stooped over to stop her from falling off. I thought of all the times when it was the other way around, Greta piggybacking me around the backyard when we were little.

  I didn’t know what I would do when we got home, I just knew that I had to get us there. I chewed a piece of gum until it was soft and then put it in Greta’s mouth, which I know is gross, but it was the only way I could think to hide her breath. Then we left, just me running with my sister, the wolves at our backs. It was like we were a story, us two. A real story, not just one I made up.

  I walked, stopping to set Greta down a few times when I started to get tired. I stayed in the woods for as long as I could before coming out onto Evergreen Circle, where I knew I could cut between the Morellis’ house and the Kleins’ and onto Young Street, which connected to our own. Right there, in that stretch of weedy grass between those two houses, Greta whispered into the back of my neck.

  “Remember invisible mermaids?” she said. Her voice was hoarse and tired. It sounded like someone else was talking, not Greta. I was breathing hard. I stopped to catch my breath.

  I nodded. I did remember. There was this tropical fish place in Queens. Neptune’s Grotto. A huge dim room, like a warehouse. Fish tanks stacked at least six high, almost right up to the ceiling, towering over the heads of Greta and me. Yellow tangs, lyretail mollies, emerald rainbowfish, kissing gou
ramis.

  Greta would grab my hand and we’d run between the aisles. The story we had was that all the fish had been trapped and we were free because we were invisible mermaids. We would hide, even though nobody was looking for us. The owner of the place was a friend of my grandfather’s, so even though we didn’t live anywhere near Queens anymore, my dad was still the accountant for that place.

  “Remember the blue place? That little blue room,” Greta mumbled.

  I nodded. That was the fish nursery where they kept the newly hatched stuff.

  My back ached and I wanted so badly to put Greta down again. She was awake. She could stand. I could set her down on the curb and we could talk about invisible mermaids. But I knew if I did that, the moment would be over. As soon as she saw my face, she’d remember to be mean. She’d remember who she was.

  “What about it?” I said.

  “I don’t know, just sometimes . . . sometimes I think about things like that. What it used to be like.”

  I almost told her that it could be like that again. That if she stopped being so mean we could go back to being like we used to be. But I didn’t say it. I wasn’t sure it was true.

  So instead I said, “Maybe we could try to go there sometime.”

  “Yeah. We could, couldn’t we?” And right in my belly I felt how much I’d been missing her. The real Greta. The old Greta.

  “Greta?” I felt her nod. “What did Mr. Nebowitz want the other night?”

  I knew asking her was risky. She struggled free of my back and stumbled onto the street. She pulled her coat tight around herself and looked down at the ground.

  “Nothing,” she mumbled. “He didn’t want anything.”

  “Did he, like . . .?” I gave her a look that implied whatever she needed it to imply. That whole idea seemed to wake her up, to turn her back into herself.

  “Ugh, June. Don’t be so gross.” She waved the back of her hand at me in a kind of drunken flap.

  “Well, what, then?”

  She eyed me up, then suddenly her frown turned into a big leery smile. “Opportunities, June. Opportunities galore.” Then she twirled around and headed down the street toward home. A few seconds later she stopped and turned to face me. She must have spun too fast, because she lost her balance and ended up grabbing on to somebody’s mailbox to stay upright. When she’d steadied herself, she focused on me.

  “You know what Megan said when I told her my uncle died of AIDS? Guess. Take a guess.”

  “Come on, Greta. We have to go.”

  “No. This is the best, June. You’ll love this. Megan looked at me all serious and said, ‘Wow, that would be a great college essay. You’d be a shoo-in with something like that.’” Greta laughed and laughed. She sat down on the road, shaking with laughter until she started coughing and coughing.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “But it’s funny, right? Right?”

  “Yeah, really funny, Greta. Hilarious.” I reached for her hand to pull her up, but she snatched it away. She stopped laughing and her face went suddenly hard.

  “You think I didn’t want to keep going to Finn’s because I didn’t care? You really think this person who I’ve known forever is dying and I don’t care?”

  Before I could say anything, she pushed herself up from the street. She flailed her arm at me dismissively and then she ran. I watched her lurching ahead, body on the edge of tipping over, stumbling down the road toward home.

  The night air revived Greta enough so she could walk upstairs without falling, change into pajamas, and get into bed.

  I changed out of my smoky clothes, then went down to tell my parents that everything was okay.

  “You know, June,” my mother said, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you and Greta are starting to do things together again.”

  It felt like even nodding would be a kind of lie.

  Twenty-Three

  This is what was in that brown paper bag from Toby:

  4 cassette tapes of Mozart’s Requiem

  1 note

  I scooted onto my bed and pressed my ear against the wall. When Greta and I are in our beds, our heads are right next to each other. If the wall wasn’t there, we’d be lying side by side. I listened for a minute to make sure she was asleep, and when I heard nothing I unzipped my backpack and spilled the tapes out onto my bed. I recognized them right away.

  They were from this one Sunday when Finn took me to Tower Records’ Classical Annex on 4th Street; he bought four different versions of Mozart’s Requiem so we could decide which one was the best. I didn’t even know that it came in other versions until Finn showed me.

  He said it’d be like the Pepsi challenge, where we chose without knowing which version was which. I had this bad feeling that they’d all sound the same to me and I’d have to look stupid in front of Finn, but that’s not what happened.

  “You’ll be surprised how different they all are,” he said. He had a little half smile, and I could tell that he’d seen what I was thinking.

  We took a taxi back to Finn’s apartment, and when we got there he made a pot of tea in the Russian teapot and put out a great big bowl of red-shelled pistachios. Then he pushed the coffee table out of the way so we could lie flat on our backs on his beautiful Turkish rug. And then we listened.

  Two of the versions were so different it made me angry. They actually had different endings, which Finn told me later was because Mozart never really finished the whole Requiem before he died and even now people argue about which part he didn’t write and how those parts should go. But I didn’t care. It just sounded wrong to me. Even the other two weren’t as good as our old version, the one we listened to most of the time, and I said that to Finn.

  He looked kind of sad after that. He patted me on the shoulder and told me that he knew what I meant. That usually the first version you hear is the one you’ll love for the rest of your life.

  The other thing in the bag was a note. This is what it said:

  Dear June,

  If you’re reading this, then it means you met me at the train station, and I want to thank you for coming. So . . . thank you!

  I will admit that I had a peek in the bag and I saw those tapes, and it made me think that there are probably so many things you know about Finn that I don’t and so many things I know that you don’t. There are loads of stories we could tell each other. But then I thought that probably it’s not going to happen.

  Everything is the same, though, if you’re interested. Same address, same phone number. Same as Finn’s. I don’t go out much. I’m usually here.

  With Affection,

  Toby

  After I read the note, I spilled out all the money Toby gave me. There were all kinds of bills—ones and fives and twenties and even fifties. It came out to $763, which was more than I’d ever had in my life. I felt like a thief with all that money. Like a thief once removed, because it felt to me like Toby was the real thief.

  I put everything in the back of my closet with the teapot and the first note from Toby, and then I fell asleep. The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.

  Twenty-Four

  “Get a look at this.” My father handed a folded-over page of the Sunday New York Post to my mother. She was at the kitchen counter, chopping mushrooms for omelets.

  “What is it?”

  “Just have a look.”

  She wiped her hands on a towel and leaned over my father’s shoulder. He raised the article up. As she read, lines formed on her forehead. She turned away.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  “It’s something to think about though,” my father said.

  Greta was still asleep so it was just me and my dad at the table, waiting for our omelets. We both liked mushr
oom and Swiss. I sipped my orange juice from an old scratched-up Welch’s jelly-jar glass that had bits and pieces of Fred Flintstone’s orange caveman suit on it.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” my mother said. “Put it away.”

  My dad gave me a helpless look, like if it was up to him I could have seen the paper. He held on to it for a second.

  “She’s fourteen, Danni.”

  “I don’t care.” My mother snatched the page out of his hand. “And that’s that.”

  I took the last sip of my juice.

  “I’m not a baby,” I said, to back my father up.

  My mother sighed and put down her knife. She looked me up and down and sighed again. “I know, Junie. I know.” She glanced at the paper, then back at me. “Here,” she said, and put it in my hand.

  I was expecting another article about the portrait. What I wasn’t expecting was a big headline about some soldier who’d done it with both a man and a woman even though he knew he had AIDS. Now all three of them had AIDS, and the soldier was probably going to jail for it.

  “So?” my father said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “That man—that Toby. It makes you think.” My father didn’t look me in the eye.

  “You think he should go to jail?” I thought of the train. I thought how he’d brought those tapes to me all the way from the city. I thought how he didn’t seem so bad.

  “Yeah, of course he should. He is a murderer.” The voice came from the doorway. Greta stood there, leaning against the wall. There’d been a rehearsal the night before and she had gray smudges of makeup all around her eyes, which made her look like some kind of ghoul. She stared right at me. “Isn’t he?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Greta hadn’t said a thing to me since the party two days ago. Now she stood with a cup of coffee in her hand, thinking she was cool. She’d started drinking coffee only a couple of weeks ago, but she acted like she’d been drinking it her whole life.