Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  I pulled out the folder of sketches and flipped straight to the one with the wolf. The dim light in my room seemed to bring it out even more. Or maybe it was just that I’d seen it before, and my eyes knew to go to the negative space. I traced around the outline with my finger, getting drowsier by the second.

  That night I fell asleep with the folder of sketches under my pillow and my electric candles on, flickering right through the night. I dreamed about the wolves in the woods. I dreamed about them climbing out of the space between me and Greta. I saw them gracefully stepping right out of the portrait and into the real world. One after the other, they shook off their painted selves and turned real, until there was a whole pack. A whole hungry pack running across the crust of snow in the woods. I dreamed I was there. That I could understand their language.

  “You take her heart,” one of them whispered. “I’ll take the eyes.”

  And in the dream I didn’t even run. I stayed exactly where I was, waiting for the wolves to tear me apart.

  Twenty-Eight

  There are two main stories in South Pacific. One has a happy ending and one doesn’t. The one that Bloody Mary is part of is the sad one. In that one, Bloody Mary sets up her daughter Liat with Lieutenant Cable, who’s in the South Pacific on a big secret mission. The daughter is young and beautiful and the two of them fall in love, but Lieutenant Cable won’t marry her, because she’s Polynesian and deep down he’s kind of a racist.

  In the other main story there’s Nellie, this annoyingly chirpy American nurse from Arkansas who falls in love with this older suave French plantation owner named Emile. Emile seems pretty okay, and every time I see that play I can’t even begin to imagine why he would want to marry Nellie, but I guess you’re supposed to believe that love is like that. It turns out Emile is a murderer, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for Nellie. What she has a problem with is that he was married to a Polynesian woman who died and now he has two kids who are half Polynesian. And, like Lieutenant Cable, she’s pretty much of a racist.

  The real question for me is why Lieutenant Cable and Nellie didn’t just get together. Because they would have been a perfect match. I guess the idea is that opposites attract, but I don’t think that’s what it’s like in real life. I think in real life you’d want someone who was as close to you as possible. Someone who could understand exactly the way you thought.

  According to Greta, Bloody Mary is the only one in the whole play who has any sense. She knows everything that happens on those islands.

  “But she’s mean,” I said.

  We were waiting for the bus in the morning, and it was nice because all the spring mud had dried up on that little patch of grass near the mailbox. The sun was bright, and I had to squint and shade my eyes to look at Greta.

  “No, she’s not,” Greta said.

  “Kind of. Well, she twists people into stuff anyway.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She’s just smart. That’s all.”

  “Whatever,” I said, but I was pretty sure most people did think Bloody Mary was mean.

  “Anyway,” Greta said, “that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to hear where you were yesterday.”

  “I told you already. Library and Beans’s, and mind your own beeswax anyway.”

  Greta smiled. “Okay, then. I’ll ask Beans.”

  I didn’t think she would do that, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Why do you even care?” I said. And I really wanted to know. I really wanted to understand why someone who seemed to hate me so much cared about where I went after school.

  Greta’s smile slipped for a second, then she turned away. The bus rounded the corner and we both looked over to see it swing its great yellow body onto our street. Greta turned back to me and stuck her chin up.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  That day I carried the bank key in one of the little front pockets of my skirt. I wanted to see the portrait after school. I wanted to see how I looked before Finn died. Plus, a vault is like a crypt, and a crypt is like a dungeon, and I wanted to see what something like that looked like.

  The day my mother gave us the keys, she also made me and Greta sign a form so that the bank knew our signatures. To get in we had to show our key and sign something so they would know it was really us. I was worried that my signature wouldn’t look the same. I wasn’t sure when that thing would happen that made it so you always signed your name exactly the same, but it hadn’t happened to me yet. So far I’d only had to sign something three times. Once for a code of conduct for the eighth grade field trip to Philadelphia, once for a pact I made with Beans and Frances Wykoski in fifth grade that we’d never have boyfriends until high school. (Of the three of us, I’m the only one who kept that pact.) And then the bank form. I don’t know what my signature looked like the first two times, but I was pretty sure it didn’t look anything like the one I did for the bank.

  It turned out that I didn’t need to worry, because the man who deals with the bank vault was Dennis Zimmer’s dad, who’s known me since kindergarten.

  “Little Junie Elbus . . .” Mr. Zimmer smiled at me. He had one of those faces that look like a turtle. Something about his upper lip. I couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of me by calling me little, because in fact I was a good two inches taller than he was. Mr. Zimmer was older than most parents, and I thought he was probably just trying to be jokey to pretend like he was younger. He held the door to the stairs open for me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I liked the smell of the bank—like clean dust—and I took a deep breath. Mr. Zimmer stepped ahead and led me down the long stairway. Halfway down, he stopped and turned to me, a serious look on his face. Now he was even shorter than before, because he was standing a couple of steps lower than me.

  “I saw you and Greta at the library,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “The paper—the article about the portrait.”

  “Oh. That.”

  Mr. Zimmer’s brow tensed up.

  “Your uncle . . . He had AIDS?”

  I looked down and nodded without looking at Mr. Zimmer.

  “I . . . It’s just I . . . I found out a college friend has it.” He tapped his forefinger up and down against the banister.

  “Sorry,” I said, still not looking him in the eye.

  “Was it awful? Was it . . .” There was a strange desperation in his voice.

  I didn’t want to be standing on the basement stairs of the Bank of New York talking to Dennis Zimmer’s dad about AIDS. I didn’t have any answers for him.

  “Pretty much,” I said. But, really, I didn’t know. It wasn’t me who was there at the end. It wasn’t me who was allowed to be there.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry to bother you like that, sorry about your uncle. It’s a good painting.”

  At the bottom of the stairs he pointed down a hallway, and I saw the thick door of the open vault. It wasn’t very dungeonlike. Not as mysterious as I’d hoped. If anything it was more James Bondish.

  “Well, here we go. I’ll need your key.”

  I showed Mr. Zimmer my key and he pulled his key out from his pocket, and the two keys together opened a door to a tall, thin safety-deposit box.

  “Your mother was lucky to get such a big box on such short notice,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Lucky,” I said.

  “I’ll give you room three, how about that?”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  Mr. Zimmer flipped on the light.

  “Take your time,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  The room had a rich look about it, with dark red wallpaper that went only halfway up the wall and curvy moldings around the ceiling that looked old fashioned. It was like the bank wanted your valuable stuff to feel at home in its new little room, far away from its real home.

  I sat for at least a minute without opening the box. It felt good to be in this small private place under the ground. I closed my eyes and im
agined I was a prisoner. A rebel kept locked up by a king. I wondered if the room was soundproof. If anyone would be able to hear me if I sang the Requiem here.

  When I took the portrait out and laid it on the desk, the first thing that caught my eye were those five black buttons. They were still sitting there like someone’s lost licorice candy.

  Then I looked for the wolf. It wasn’t as easy to see it in the real portrait. I had to prop up the painting and walk to the other end of the tiny room to make it out, and even then I had to squint to see it. In the real portrait there’s stuff in the background. A window. A curtain fluttering. Some stuff on the windowsill and pictures hanging on the wall behind us. The negative space was all chopped up, and it was almost impossible to hold the wolf there without letting it slip away. I did it for a second. I thought I had it, but then it went.

  My face looked mostly the same, but I could already see that I looked a little younger than I do now. Already I could tell that the portrait would always be a kind of trick mirror that would find a way to show me what I used to be like. The other thing that felt different was that now I wanted to know what the secret was that Finn had painted into my head. I wish I’d asked.

  I took a good close look at Greta. At first I thought she looked exactly the same, but she didn’t. On the back of her hand was the outline of a black skull. It was maybe the size of a bottlecap and it must have been painted with the thinnest brush you could get, the kind I’d seen at Finn’s where there was only a single bristle coming out of the handle. I couldn’t stop looking at the skull because it seemed impossible that I wouldn’t have seen it there before, that my mother wouldn’t have seen it, but also it seemed impossible that someone could have painted it on after. Who would do that?

  I bent my head right in close, my nose almost touching the canvas. I thought if I looked close enough I’d see where the magic came from. How it was that a delicate skull could suddenly be sitting pretty on the back of my sister’s left hand. But no. Nothing.

  I packed the portrait back up. When I opened the door, Mr. Zimmer was out there waiting.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “I was wondering,” I said. “I was just wondering if anyone else has been down here to see this box.”

  “Oh, well, I can’t really say. Privacy and all that.” He strummed his fingers against the metal box. “But from my understanding, it’s only you and your sister who have keys at the moment. That’s what your mother told us. That’s what she said she wanted.”

  That’s what I thought. But then, Greta must have been here. Greta must have come down here before me and painted that skull right on her own hand.

  Twenty-Nine

  Everything looked like it was starting to thaw for real. It was Saturday, and Greta had dragged a sun lounger out from the garage into the backyard. My father told her not to, but she put on her little pouty face and told him she was going to read a book for homework out there and he let her do it. So there she was, in an oversize sweatshirt and shorts, eyes closed, The Odyssey facedown on her chest.

  My mother had gone to Grand Union to do some early-morning shopping, and when she came back she was holding a pile of mail.

  “There’s something here for you, Junie.”

  “Me?”

  She held up a big brown envelope. “Young Cheesemakers of America?”

  Toby. I knew it was Toby. I tried not to panic.

  “Oh, yeah . . . I . . . it’s a home-ec thing.”

  “Well, here you go.” She smiled. “I’ll take a nice ripe camembert. If you’re making.”

  “Okay . . . yeah. Camembert.” I tossed the envelope on the table like it was no big deal, but as soon as I got the chance I took it and scuttled up to my room.

  Toby had sent the old-fashioned picture of the two of us from Playland. It made me smile because this secret thing had passed right through my mother’s hands without her knowing it.

  The picture was done in sepia, and if I believed in fairy-tale things I would say Toby looked almost like an angel. His hands were clasped behind his back and his head was tilted down, but his eyes were looking up like he’d just heard someone ringing a bell over his head. He was on the left side, and I was in a chair right in the middle of the picture. I wasn’t smiling, which helped with the authenticity of the thing, since nobody ever smiled in pictures in those days. My hands were folded in my lap and I was looking straight at the camera. We were both wearing these great puffy ruffs, which sort of made it look like our heads were on platters. It was an okay picture, but there was something really weird about the whole thing.

  After studying the picture for a few minutes, I realized what was wrong: It was a photograph, which obviously wouldn’t have been around in Elizabethan times, so even though we both looked pretty good in our costumes, there was still something stupid about it. Something off. If I’d been with Finn, he would have realized right away that we should choose something from the times when cameras were invented. He would have convinced me in a second to be Annie Oakley or someone like that.

  I flipped the picture over and saw that Toby had taped a note on there. You can cut me out if you want to! That’s all it said. At first I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but then I realized that he meant that I could cut the picture in half. That if I wanted to, I could throw his part away.

  The next morning, Sunday, I was sitting in the kitchen with my parents, reading the funny pages. It was an ordinary morning until Greta came down. She walked across the kitchen in her pajamas and reached for the coffeepot.

  “Here she is. Our budding starlet,” my dad said.

  Both of them sat there beaming at her. Like they were actually starstruck by Greta.

  I looked at them like they’d lost their minds. Then I looked at Greta to see if there was a hint of what this was about. Her eyes were slits.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “So it looks like Greta hasn’t shared the news with you either.”

  I shook my head.

  “Go on, honey,” my dad said, “tell your sister.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Greta said. “I don’t even know if I want to do it.”

  “Of course you want to,” my mother said. “Opportunities don’t come swimming—”

  “Yeah, Mom. We all know.”

  I looked around at everyone. “So, what? What’s this big news?”

  “We had a call from Mr. Nebowitz last night, and . . .”

  “And,” my mother continued, “he has a friend involved with the Broadway production of Annie, and this friend asked if Mr. Nebowitz had any students who might be right as a summer fill-in for the role of Pepper, and, well, he said the only one he would even consider recommending was your sister. Can you believe it?”

  Greta’s teeth were gritted and her left foot was tapping the kitchen floor. “Mom, I’m probably not doing it, okay? Maybe next year or something.”

  My mother’s smile disappeared and her hands were suddenly on her hips. “There’s no next year. Do you think they’ll wait around until next year? Even if they did, which they wouldn’t, you’d be too old by then. That’s not how opportunities work.”

  “Maybe I don’t care,” Greta said.

  My mother’s eyes widened. “Well, I do. I do care. This is the kind of thing people dream of. If you let this pass, you’ll go through your life and you’ll get to my age and you’ll sit in your kitchen thinking what a fool you were.” Her face had started to go red. “You think there are second chances? Do you? Well, there aren’t. They dart right by, and before you know it . . . before you even know what’s happened they’re just a blur in the distance. And then what? Then what are you supposed to do? Then you’ll be calling me up saying you should have listened. You should have taken your chance when it came. You . . .”

  We all stood there, stunned.

  “Mom, are you crying?” I asked.

  She shook her head, but anyone could see there were tears in her eyes.
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  In the end, Greta agreed that she’d do Annie. The people from the city would still have to come see Greta for themselves before it was definite, but we all knew she’d get the part. She would go onstage and play a real orphan. Greta said yes, and then my mother spent a whole long time asking whether she was sure and letting her know that there was no pressure. No pressure at all.

  Thirty

  We were all watching Family Ties. Our whole family together, even Greta, who’d been more sullen than usual since the Annie episode. It felt really good and only seemed to happen on nights when Family Ties and The Cosby Show were on. I was pretty sure Greta only watched because she thought Alex Keaton, played by Michael J. Fox, was cute. I heard her saying it on the phone once.

  “Popcorn?” my mother said after the show.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  My dad had bought the air popper for Christmas and we all loved it. Watching the popped corns build up until there were enough of them to force their way over into the bowl was a show in itself.

  The news came on, and the warm smell of melting butter mingled with facts about Klaus Barbie’s war crimes and the Iran-Contra affair.

  “So how’s good old South Pacific going?” my dad said.

  Greta shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Whatever.”

  My dad looked like he was waiting for more, but Greta quickly picked up the TV Guide and started flipping through it.

  My mom walked in, holding a great big metal bowl heaped up with popcorn.

  “Two batches,” she said. “And more butter than I’m willing to tell you about.” She smiled and set the bowl down. We reached in, grabbing popcorn by the fistful.

  The local news started with a story about a fire in Mount Kisco that destroyed an apartment building. After that came a story about a judge in Yonkers who moved his whole courtroom out into the parking lot because the guy he was sentencing had AIDS. “Fresh air and sunshine,” the judge said, talking about how he thought it was safer for the court staff not to be in a tight little courtroom with germs like that. They interviewed people on the street to see if they thought the judge was being reasonable. One woman said she wasn’t sure, but she thought it was better to be safe than sorry. Then they had a guy who said that it wasn’t the judge who was crazy, it was AIDS that was crazy.