Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  They segued into a more general piece about AIDS. As usual, they started out with footage of some kind of sweaty nightclub in the city with a bunch of gay men dancing around in stupid leather outfits. I couldn’t even begin to imagine Finn dancing the night away like some kind of half-dressed cowboy. It would have been nice if for once they showed some guys sitting in their living rooms drinking tea and talking about art or movies or something. If they showed that, then maybe people would say, “Oh, okay, that’s not so strange.”

  I was about to go up to my room when the newscaster came on with a story about AZT, which was apparently a drug that helped people survive with AIDS. I sat back down, waiting to hear what he had to say, and when I did I couldn’t get up again. The FDA had just approved it, he said. The drug would be available to the public within six months.

  None of us said anything. The unfairness of what we’d heard had turned us all mute. My fists closed on the couch fabric. Finn had just missed it. Another few months and . . .

  My mother stood and walked out of the room without looking back, but I was frozen to the couch. A science reporter came on, giving more details about exactly how AZT worked, but I couldn’t seem to hear any of it. My dad, usually the quiet one, shouted, “Enough,” at the screen. Then he stamped across the room, slapped the off button with his palm, and walked out.

  Thirty-One

  It was March 17, forty-one days since Finn died. In Earth Science, Mr. Zerbiak was talking about black holes. Black holes aren’t an Earth Science topic, but Mr. Zerbiak is like that. One minute Adam Bell was asking a question about a meteoroid he found in his backyard, and the next Mr. Zerbiak was saying that he was “going a little off topic here, but . . .” and of course everyone was suddenly all interested. If teachers pretended that everything they said was “off topic,” we’d have a whole school full of straight-A students. That’s what I’d do if I ever became a teacher, which I’d seriously consider if the falconry didn’t work out. You could see a certain look in Mr. Zerbiak’s eyes when he veered off topic, like maybe he’d always dreamed of being an astronomer instead of a high school science teacher. His hands waved everywhere and he went on and on about gravity and escape velocities.

  People took turns raising their hands, trying to keep Mr. Zerbiak from getting back to real work for as long as possible. I raised my hand and asked whether it was true that black holes might be secret passages to other times. I’d read that once, that there might be holes in space that would be like time machines. He said he didn’t think so. “That’s taking us into the realm of science fiction, Miss Elbus,” he said, before deciding that we’d now gone way too far off on a tangent and had to return to course material. The whole class groaned. I saw Jenny Halpern narrow her eyes at me. It didn’t really matter, though, because I wouldn’t have to see Jenny Halpern or any of them for a couple of days. The next day was a teacher curriculum day. No school.

  I’d called Toby a few days before to tell him I was coming to visit. On the phone he seemed like he couldn’t believe I’d actually called him, and I was thinking, Don’t get too excited, buddy, because to me the whole thing was just a mission. A mission to get whatever stuff he had from Finn.

  Greta was going on the train to the Galleria in White Plains with Julie and Megan. I told my mother that I might go to the library or I might not, which somehow didn’t seem like too much of a lie. She asked if I was meeting up with Beans, and I said I might, which was a complete lie, but it made my mother smile. What all this meant was that I’d have the whole day in the city without having to worry about being missed.

  I took the next train after the one Greta took, and the whole way down I felt like everyone could see that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d worn my medieval boots, and right before I left, I’d snuck into Greta’s room and stolen a squirt of her Jean Naté perfume. It felt like putting on a disguise, hiding under the scent of Greta. I rode that train into the city feeling like a whole different person, someone who smelled of lemons and baby powder instead of myself.

  Toby told me to take a taxi from Grand Central to the apartment. I stared out the window the whole way, because it was raining, which is how I like the city best. It looks like it’s been polished up. All the streets shine and the lights from everywhere reflect off the black. It’s like the whole place has been dipped in sugar syrup. Like the city is some kind of big candy apple.

  Toby said he’d wait outside to pay for the taxi when I got there. Finn’s apartment building isn’t the kind with a doorman. It’s the kind you have to buzz to get into, and as we pulled up I could see Toby standing in the little space that was between the outside door and another door that went into the building. He stepped out and smiled, and I saw that he was wearing one of Finn’s cardigans. On Finn it was big and floppy, but on Toby it was too short, and he was stretching it down over his body. It looked wrong on him. Embarrassing. I must have been frowning, because when Toby ran out into the rain to open my door, the first thing he said to me was, “Is everything all right?” I told him it was. I was trying hard not to let my eyes go to Finn’s soft brown sweater, but I couldn’t help it. Toby saw me and didn’t seem to know what to say.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, stooping a little, bowing his head. Then he paid the taxi driver and waved him off without even waiting for change.

  “Lead the way,” he said. He’d propped the door open with a fat Manhattan phone book, and he picked it up as we went in. His long arm reached over my shoulder to push the button for the elevator. The door was shiny steel, and I saw Toby looking at me in its reflection.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You know, thanks for coming.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said, even though in the scheme of my life it was a huge deal to be going down to the city without anybody in my family knowing about it.

  The elevator in Finn’s building was slow and old, and it had always seemed like a long time before it got to the twelfth floor.

  “It’s open,” Toby said when we got to the door. I put one hand on the doorknob, then stopped and turned to Toby.

  “Is it different in there?” I didn’t mean to sound scared, but that’s how it came out.

  Toby didn’t answer; he just reached over my head and pushed the door open, and there it was. Finn’s place. Just like always. The Turkish rug. The papier-mâché elephant on top of this old carved trunk he had. Those black-and-white pictures he’d taken of my grandfather’s hands, which were so close up they looked like the landscape of some other planet. There was a framed picture of each hand, left and right, on each side of the huge window that looked down onto 83rd Street. The only different thing about the apartment was that it didn’t smell like lavender and orange anymore. Now the place smelled mostly of stale cigarette smoke.

  Toby scooped up a bunch of papers and books and clothes from the couch and piled them on one of the dining table chairs.

  “There, that’s better,” he said. “Come in. Sit down.” He seemed nervous, smiling too much and fussing over little things. Smoothing out a crumpled cushion, straightening a crooked picture on the wall. He’d taken Finn’s cardigan off as we walked in and underneath he was wearing a shabby black Museum of Natural History T-shirt with glow-in-the-dark dinosaur bones all over it. After a while he sat on the couch opposite me.

  “So, what did you think of the photo?”

  “It’s good.”

  “Brilliant.” He sounded surprised. “I thought there was something a bit, I don’t know, odd about it. But I’m glad you like it.”

  “Well . . . it is a little weird.”

  “Oh.”

  “But in a good way. Like art.”

  Toby’s smile had faded but now was back full beam. “Yeah. Like art. Just like art.” He looked at me like he thought I was the smartest person he’d ever met. “Like I said, you can cut me out if you want. There’s a big space between us. I don’t mind.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I wouldn’t do something like that.”

&n
bsp; “Well, it’s your copy, so if you change your mind . . .”

  “I really wouldn’t.”

  We sat there after that, not knowing what to say to each other. After a few minutes Toby stood up.

  “Tea?”

  While he was in the kitchen, I had a chance to look around the apartment without anyone watching me. Finn’s old blue velvet chair was still there. The seat was all worn, but the back was bright because Finn was always leaning forward when he sat there, in toward the easel in front of him.

  On a table in the corner was a lamp Finn had made by burying a lightbulb in the middle of a goldfish bowl full of green sea glass. There were pieces of smooth glass in every shade of green you could think of, and when you turned on the light it looked like something from the future. Next to it was this chess set that Finn had made in art school. He said he kept it to remind him never, ever to be a pretentious idiot. All the squares on the board were black, so it was hard to know whether you were in the right place. The pieces were these tiny rat skulls that he’d varnished. Each one had a small mark to tell you what piece it was. The bishops had a little cross on the top, and the knights had small horse heads. But other than that they were all the same. Practically identical unless you looked up close, and then you’d start to see the differences. Like one might have a chipped-off tooth or something. I couldn’t see what was so pretentious about it. It was kind of gross, but I liked it.

  I had one of the skulls in my hand when Toby came back out with the tea.

  “Care for a game?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “If you want.” I didn’t really know how to play chess, but I didn’t want to admit it to Toby. I brought the board over and set it on the coffee table between us.

  He’d made the tea in a plain white teapot that dribbled when it poured and was nowhere near as good as the Russian teapot. I could tell we both knew that, but neither of us said anything.

  “Sugar?” Toby said, raising a spoon over a half-full sugar bag. Finn used to put sugar cubes on a little plate with tiny tongs that were shaped like the claws of a small animal. Toby must not have known about that, because he just brought out the wrinkled sugar bag.

  “Two,” I said.

  “Excellent. I like a woman who’s bold with her sugar.” I turned away and smiled, mostly because he’d called me a woman. Toby stirred two spoonfuls into my cup and then what looked like about four into his own.

  He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and slid one out. Then he looked over at me like he wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Do you . . .” He tilted the pack toward me and raised his eyebrows. That was the first time anyone had offered me a cigarette, and I wondered then if Toby knew how old I was.

  I slid one out of the pack and said thanks, like it was something I did all the time. Like Greta would, not showing anything. Toby took his, then lit them both with a neon orange lighter.

  “Ahhh, that’s more civilized,” he said, inhaling deep, suddenly seeming to relax a bit. I took the smallest puff and coughed, then put the cigarette down in the ashtray. I was waiting for Toby to laugh at me, but he didn’t.

  “You or me?” he asked, nudging his head toward the chessboard.

  “You can go first. I don’t care.”

  Toby lined up all the pieces, then moved one of his.

  I watched what he did, then moved something on my side that was almost the same.

  “Where’s all your stuff?” I asked, scanning the apartment.

  He hesitated, crossing his gangly legs. He stared at the chessboard, then moved one of his pawns.

  “Well,” he said, “you know, some of this is my stuff.”

  I looked around the apartment. I could only see Finn’s things. The same things that had been in this place forever. I moved one of my pawns, barely looking at the board.

  “What do you mean?”

  Toby didn’t look me in the eye. He had a finger on one of his knights, but he took it back off and had a drink of his tea. Then he took a long pull on his cigarette before resting it on the edge of the ashtray. He still wouldn’t look at me, and suddenly I started to realize what he meant. I looked around again, this time eyeing everything with suspicion.

  “Well . . .” he said, sliding the knight halfway across the board.

  “So, which things are yours?” I waved the back of my hand at the room.

  “I’ve lived here for almost nine years, June. It’s hard to say exactly what’s mine.”

  Nine years. Nine years? I was five nine years ago. He had to be lying.

  “Well, I want to know. I want to see what’s yours.”

  Toby looked at me like he was really starting to feel sorry for me. He glanced around the room, then pointed to the big wooden shelf near the door.

  “That jar. Those guitar picks. They’re mine, for instance.”

  Finn’s guitar pickles. Those picks—“plectrums,” Finn told me to call them if I wanted to sound like I knew what I was talking about. I used to play with those for hours and hours when I was a little kid. Dumping them onto the carpet, the colors like candy. Hours and hours of sorting them and piling them up and setting them out into long lines like roads stretching the length of Finn’s living room. I used to have contests with Greta to see who could find the prettiest one out of all the swirled marbled patterns in that jar. How could those not be Finn’s?

  “Are you sure?”

  “June, Finn couldn’t play guitar. You know that, don’t you? He was a misery at musical instruments.”

  I didn’t know that. Of course I didn’t, because I didn’t know anything.

  “Yeah. Of course I know that. You don’t have to tell me about Finn. He was my uncle.”

  I picked up my king and plonked it right down in the middle of the board. Toby slid a pawn diagonally three spaces.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Well, why didn’t Finn ever tell me about you?” I was trying hard to keep the anger out of my voice.

  Toby shrugged and glanced down.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m nothing to brag about really. Look at me. I’m a mess, I’m—”

  “That’s no excuse. I’m nothing to brag about either but you knew about me, didn’t you?”

  “June, listen, I used to be jealous of you, you know.”

  That really ticked me off, because I’m not a jealous person. Not at all. Why should I be jealous? What would I have to be jealous about? I looked at Toby perched on the edge of the couch, hunched over, legs crossed, trying to fold his long body down. Toby with his stupid accent. English but not real English. Not Room with a View English or Lady Jane English but some broad slurry thing I didn’t know anything about. I watched him sitting there with cards up his sleeve. Decks and decks of surprise cards he could slide out whenever he wanted to. Stories of him and Finn I’d never heard. Not like me. My deck was thin. Worn out from shuffling over and over in my head. My Finn stories were dull and plain. Small and stupid.

  “I’m not jealous,” I said.

  “All right. Sorry. Of course you’re not.” Toby scratched a finger over the arm of the couch, then he looked at me. “But I was. I was jealous of you. All those Sundays . . .”

  He was just saying that to make me feel better. I could tell.

  “And you’re not jealous anymore?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Because Finn’s dead?”

  Toby fidgeted with the hem of his shirt. That was something else I noticed. He was always fidgeting. Why would Finn—who could have chosen anyone he wanted for a boyfriend, a so-called special friend—choose Toby?

  “Yeah, probably,” he said. He looked at the floor, then up at me.

  The rain pounded against the window and we both sat there quiet for a long time, sipping on our cold cups of tea. Toby lit another cigarette.

  I stared down at the chessboard, because I didn’t want Toby to see my eyes. Then I stood up and said I had to go to the bathroom. I walked down the hallway, and right away I c
ould see that Finn’s bedroom door was open—the door that had always been closed, private. Every single time I’d been there it was closed. I went up to the bathroom door and closed it, but I didn’t go in. Instead, I tiptoed back down the hallway and stood outside Finn’s bedroom. The room was dim, the overcast light coming through a wispy white curtain. I stared for a while, standing on the threshold. Then I did what I knew I shouldn’t do. I stepped in.

  There was a big red guitar in the corner. There were two pairs of slippers, two bathrobes hung over a chair. One of them was Finn’s yellow one. The other was blue. The bed was unmade, and I tried to guess which side Finn would have slept on. Then it was obvious. One side table had two empty cigarette packs, half a bottle of gin, and a York Peppermint Pattie wrapper on it. The other had an old-fashioned alarm clock and a frame with three photographs in it. I stepped over and picked up the frame. The top picture was of Finn and Toby. It was black and white and looked like it might have been taken in London, because there was one of those big black taxis in the background. They both looked young and so happy. Toby was taller than Finn, and he was leaning his cheek in to rest on the top of Finn’s head. I took my thumb and covered Toby’s face with it so it was just Finn. Just Finn wearing my thumb like a hat. The middle picture was Greta and me when we were much younger. We were in Finn’s apartment and we were each painting at an easel. The third one was the oldest. It was Finn and my mother. A holiday snapshot. A beach somewhere.

  I listened for a second to make sure Toby wasn’t coming to look for me, then I climbed into the bed. I slid in on Finn’s side and pulled the covers up all around me. This is where Finn and Toby had sex. This might be the scene of the crime. This might be the very place where Toby gave Finn AIDS. I slid my hands over the sheets, pressed my face into Finn’s pillow. Private. This was what private meant.