Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  I laughed and gave him a shove, but he was stronger than he looked and he didn’t budge.

  I’d taken the train down, as usual, and Toby made tea, like he always did. It looked like he’d been trying to keep the apartment cleaned up, but there was still a shabbiness about it. I didn’t say anything, because I could see he’d been making an effort. Toby brought out a box of Oreos and I took one. I pulled it apart and scraped the white cream out with my teeth. Then I dipped the two cookie halves into my tea. Toby didn’t eat anything.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “About what you were saying. About how we could do anything.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I’m still working on it. I haven’t figured it all out yet.”

  “The suspense, June. The suspense.” Toby widened his eyes and smiled. “I’d like to say take your time, but . . .”

  “Ha-ha,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t really that much of a joke. “And—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I was also thinking that maybe, if you want, we could look at those paintings. The ones in the basement.”

  “Are you sure? You think you’re ready?”

  The truth was, I didn’t know if I would ever be ready, but I nodded anyway.

  I led the way this time, straight to the cage, without any hesitation at all. I waited while Toby opened the sticky padlock, and then I stepped in first.

  There were two piles of painted canvases on top of the wooden pallet. Maybe thirty or forty paintings in all. I turned to look at Toby.

  “These are all Finn’s?”

  He nodded.

  “But that article. Did you see that article in the Times?”

  Toby shook his head. “I don’t buy newspapers.”

  “There was an article and it had a picture of our portrait in it. . . .” I stopped, waiting to see if he would confess to sending it in.

  “Yes?” he said, with no hint at all that he knew anything about it. I tried to catch if he was hiding something, but he only looked slightly confused.

  “Well, it said Finn stopped painting. Like ten years ago or something.”

  Toby shook his head. “No, no. He just stopped showing his work, that’s all. Could you imagine Finn not making some kind of art?”

  Again, I felt stupid. Like I didn’t know Finn anywhere near as well as Toby did.

  “No, I guess not,” I said. “But why would he stop showing it?”

  “He said the whole circus of it bored him. So he sold a painting here and there when he needed money, but that was it. ‘I don’t have to prove anything anymore.’ That’s what he said.”

  That all made sense to me, but I knew my mother would think it was ridiculous. That Finn was a fool to let all that opportunity swim away from him.

  Toby pointed to the paintings. “I can leave you if you want. Give you some time with these by yourself. Lock up and come back up when you’re done.” He held the key out to me.

  I didn’t say anything and Toby turned to go. Behind my back I heard him closing the cage door. I wanted to look at the paintings all on my own. I didn’t want to be afraid, but my mother was right. The place was like something out of a horror movie.

  “Toby?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You could stay . . . you know, if you want.”

  He smiled, and before I knew it he was back in the cage, stretched out on the chaise longue, pouring a drink from one of those fancy crystal bottles.

  “I won’t watch you,” he said. “Pretend I’m not even here.”

  I sat myself down cross-legged on the floor and looked at the paintings one by one. Most of the canvases were small as far as art goes. Maybe the size of a microwave door. The first few were of abstract stuff. Shapes and colors. I didn’t want to find them boring, but I did. I knew that if I were smarter, those would probably look like the best paintings in the world, but I am who I am and I want to tell the truth, and the truth is that I thought they were pretty boring. Still, I took my time looking at each one, in case Toby was watching me. I didn’t want it to look like I didn’t like Finn’s work. But once I got past those abstract ones, it wasn’t a problem. After about ten of those abstract paintings there was a piece of white paper with Finn’s old handwriting on it. Not the scrawly handwriting he had when he was sick but the neat firm writing he used to have. WISHING YOU HERE (23). That’s what it said.

  After that I was 100 percent hooked.

  The Wishing You Here paintings looked like oversize old-fashioned postcards of places all around America. They each had intricate painted stamps and postmarks and pictures in colors that weren’t quite real. The water was more turquoise, the skies so blue they were almost hard to look at. Taos, Fairbanks, Hollywood. But the weirdest thing about those paintings was that in each and every one there was some kind of picture of Toby. Not like the real Toby exactly, but like he was transformed into something else. There’s one of Mount Rushmore, where Toby’s face is carved into the mountain alongside the presidents. One in Alaska, where there’s a grizzly bear with Toby’s face. Another in the Everglades, where it took me ages to even find him, because Finn had painted him as a gnarled old swamp tree.

  I glanced over at Toby. He’d fallen asleep on the chaise longue, a field guide to seashells open on his chest. I picked up the white sheet that had been covering the stack of paintings and got up and laid it over him, tucking it in at his chin. I stood there for a minute, watching the sheet move slowly up and down with his breathing. I smiled, because it was the first thing I’d done so far that could maybe count as looking after him, and it felt good to do it. Like maybe I was on the right track.

  After a while I went back to the paintings. Some were so ridiculous I couldn’t help laughing out loud. I think my favorite one was from Arizona, where Toby is this huge saguaro cactus with an owl living right in the middle of him. I started laughing because the whole thing was so, well, silly. That was the only word for it. I must have woken Toby, because the next second he was there, kneeling down on the floor behind me, looking over my shoulder, saying, “I don’t see what’s so humorous,” before bursting out laughing himself.

  “I can’t believe I’ve let you see these, June Elbus.”

  “I can’t either,” I said.

  And then a door slammed somewhere in the basement and we both froze.

  “Shhhh,” Toby said.

  I could hear somebody getting their laundry. A dryer door opening and Toby saying, “Shhh,” again. I flipped to the next painting. There was Toby’s face on a stylized Inuit salmon jumping upstream. British Columbia, it said, and the Toby fish was leaping through the C of Columbia. I let out a wail of laughter and Toby looked down, seeing the exact same thing, and then he started too. We both tried as hard as we could not to laugh, but we couldn’t. I couldn’t.

  “Hey, who’s down here?” an old man’s voice called out from the laundry area.

  Toby pulled me in to him, saying, “Shhh, shhh,” again and again. He wrapped his arms around me and put his broad palm over my mouth, trying to get me to stop laughing. His arms felt stronger than I would have thought. A lot stronger. I stayed there quiet and thought, This is what it felt like to be Finn. This is what it feels like to be held by someone you love. I flipped to the next painting, expecting another postcard, but instead it was Finn. A self-portrait, staring right out at us. There was nothing fancy about it. It was Finn in his blue hat, his blue eyes looking like they were trying to say something without words. The old man kept hollering and Toby’s hand was still over my mouth. I could feel his fingers against my lips, and we weren’t laughing anymore. We were both staring at Finn. “Come on out, goddammit.” And the earthy damp of the basement and Toby’s fingers that felt like lips against mine. And Finn’s eyes, saying, I love you, June. And without thinking, my mouth parted and I felt myself kiss Toby’s fingers. Gentle and soft, eyes closed, imagining everything and nothing, and I could feel Toby’s arms stronger and stronger, his breath in my hair. And then
I felt a kiss. A single soft kiss on the back of my neck.

  Over the next few days I went down to see Toby whenever I could. Sometimes I would take the train right after school. Other times I would leave early. I’d cut gym or home ec or sometimes even Spanish if I was feeling bold.

  I think New York was the perfect place for Toby to live because it was maybe the only place he would never run out of new restaurants. With Finn you had places. Horn & Hardart. The Cloisters. Places we went back to so many times that they started to feel like home. Toby was loose. Attached to nothing. Except maybe to Finn. That’s what I started to figure out. Without Finn, Toby was like a kite with nobody holding the string.

  One afternoon Toby tried to teach me how to do the bicycle in the flea circus. After fifteen minutes of trying to make it look like a flea was riding that bicycle, I understood how good Toby was. Sometimes, even close up, it looked to me like there really was something riding that bike. Even standing right next to Toby, I’d get that sensation. My hands moved like they were made of thick clay. And I knew my face gave away everything. Anyone could see I was moving one hand under the stage.

  But Toby wouldn’t give up. He made me try again and again, until by the time I had to go home I was able to make the bike inch around the ring. I knew it looked painful and slow and awful, but Toby was patient and didn’t seem to mind. What I was starting to like about him was that he never lied to me. He never tried to butter me up by pretending I was some kind of budding flea-circus genius. He never said, “Good job,” or “Brilliant,” or any lame, meaningless comments like that. It was never like he was talking to a kid. When he said something I could believe him.

  At the end of that day he said, “Keep trying. I promise you’ll get better.” That’s all he said, but it made me happy because I knew it was exactly what he meant.

  Another time we walked through Central Park and then downtown all the way to Chinatown. Toby talked about playing the guitar, his impossibly long fingers stroking at the air. I told him about the woods and the wolves and jumping rope backward and he didn’t laugh at me at all. We ended up at a place called Cheng Fat Lucky Fortune, where we ordered moo shu vegetables with extra pancakes. Toby ordered a Volcano Bowl, which turned out to be a giant crazy drink that was on fire.

  It came in a huge ceramic bowl with pictures of hula dancers and palm trees on the outside, and there were paper umbrellas and pieces of pineapple and maraschino cherries and big long straws. It was sweet, like coconut and Hawaiian Punch mixed together, and it hardly even tasted like alcohol. We drank and talked and ate, although I noticed it was mostly me eating. Toby only pushed the food around on his plate. That day was the first time I was ever drunk; it made me happy to know that it was a Volcano Bowl that did it. And I suddenly understood that getting drunk was just one more way to leave this place, this time. We stumbled out of Cheng Fat Lucky Fortune, and as my head spun I wondered where Greta went. Deep in the woods, buried in leaves, drunk as can be—how far away did she go?

  Toby put his arm around me to steady me on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. I looked at him through hazy eyes.

  “It’s just us now, isn’t it?” I said. But even as the words were coming out, I knew it wasn’t really true. Finn was always there. Finn would always be there.

  And then I thought something terrible. I thought that if Finn were still alive, Toby and I wouldn’t be friends at all. If Finn hadn’t caught AIDS, I would never even have met Toby. That strange and awful thought swirled around in my buzzy head. Then something else occurred to me. What if it was AIDS that made Finn settle down? What if even before he knew he had it, AIDS was making him slower, pulling him back to his family, making him choose to be my godfather. It was possible that without AIDS I would never have gotten to know Finn or Toby. There would be a big hole filled with nothing in place of all those hours and days I’d spent with them. If I could time-travel, could I be selfless enough to stop Finn from getting AIDS? Even if it meant I would never have him as my friend? I didn’t know. I had no idea how greedy my heart really was.

  I stood there staring at the sky over Canal Street as it faded from orange to a dusty pink. An old lady dragged a shopping cart filled with bags down the street, click click clicking over the sidewalk. The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.

  I looked over at Toby. His eyes were closed and he was smiling like he was remembering the best moment in his life, and all at once I understood that this wouldn’t go on forever. It couldn’t. It wasn’t only that I knew sooner or later I’d get caught for cutting classes. It wasn’t even that tax season was almost over, so I’d have my parents watching everything I did. And it wasn’t that I knew Toby would die. I don’t know how to say it other than to say that the whole thing felt fragile. Like it was made of spun sugar.

  But I didn’t want to think about that. I’d found a friend. And I started to believe that Toby wanted to see me because of me. Not just because of what I knew about Finn. I knew I’d made that mistake before, not understanding who I was with people. With Beans. With Ben. With Finn. Maybe even with Greta. But Toby had nobody. There didn’t seem any way I could be falling into that same trap again.

  Forty-Five

  My mother rooted around in her purse. It was Thursday morning, before school. It was gray outside, and the top branches of the maple were swaying around in the wind. My father had gone on ahead to the office, but my mother’s first appointment was later so she decided to meet him down there. She was already in her work clothes—one of her navy suits with massive shoulder pads. She moved around the kitchen like it was an alien planet when she was in her work clothes, always standing back from the counter, careful not to brush against anything greasy or wet.

  “You’re buying lunch today, right, June?”

  I usually bought lunch. Pizza. Tater Tots. Soda. All of which were much better than a soggy bologna sandwich in a soggy brown bag. I started to say yes, but then I stopped myself.

  “I don’t know. I was thinking maybe I could have a bagged lunch today. A PBJ or something?”

  It was the thought of my mother’s manicured hand holding the bread, spreading the peanut butter thin and even, spooning on just the right amount of jam. The thought of her cutting my sandwich on the diagonal, then wrapping it neatly in waxed paper. It was the thought of her doing that for me, taking care of me like that, that made me ask.

  My mother clicked her purse shut and looked up at me.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded hard. “Yeah.”

  She put her purse on the counter and started to roll up the sleeves of her jacket. She reached into the cabinet and pulled down the jars. Then she stopped and turned to me.

  “You know, Junie, you’re fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. Here.” She pushed the jar of peanut butter across the counter and rolled her sleeves back down. Even though there wasn’t a crumb on her, she brushed the front of her jacket hard with both hands. I stared at the jar for a few seconds.

  The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have made me that sandwich. If she knew that I’d searched and searched the house until I finally found the little key to the fireproof box buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer, if she knew that I’d unlocked the box and taken my passport out, that I had it with me right that very second in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of my backpack, if she knew why I had it there, if she knew even a bit of all that, she might have made me that PBJ. She wouldn’t have said, “You’re fourteen now,” like she thought I was some kind of responsible adult. No. If she knew about my plan, she would have said, “you’re only fourteen.” She would have told me that I was crazy to think about going to England when I was only fourteen. Crazy to even consider it. And that would be before she knew I’d be going with Toby.

  But she didn’t know any of that. And right then she didn’t want
to get her work suit messed up with sticky grape jelly. So instead of making me a sandwich, she made out like fourteen was some kind of turning point in my great journey to becoming a fully grown woman.

  “It’s okay,” I said after a few seconds. “Whatever. I’ll just take the money.”

  My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

  Forty-Six

  “Toby?”

  “June?”

  “Well, um . . . I was just wondering if maybe you’d want to go see The Name of the Rose with me. Sometime. Whenever. You know, if you want.”

  It was the first time I was the one asking Toby to do something. Up until then he was always the one. I’d dropped my backpack on the kitchen floor and called him as soon as I got home. I usually had at least an hour in the empty house, and I dragged the phone into the thin pantry at the side of the kitchen, where there was a stool to sit on.

  I chose The Name of the Rose because it’s about medieval monks in a remote monastery in Italy. It’s a murder mystery and it was supposed to be really good, so I thought Toby would say yes right away, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything for such a long time that I thought something had happened to him.

  “Toby?”

  “I’m not Finn, you know.”

  It was my turn to go quiet. After a while I said, “Yeah, so?” in a sort of duh tone, because I didn’t get his point.

  “Well, I don’t know, I might not like it.”

  I thought about it for a second. “Well,” I said patiently, “I’m not Finn either.”

  “Just, you know, there’ll be no value added. It’ll be like going to a film with any old idiot.”