Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “I never wanted to,” I said. And I finally got that it was both of us. It had always been both of us. It was never only Greta. Everything she said was true. After all the years of being best friends, I’d abandoned her. How could I not have seen that? How could I have been so selfish?

  Greta slipped out of bed and turned the radio on really low. She had a coat hanger attached to the antenna so she could get WLIR all the way from Long Island. WLIR was the cool radio station, because they played mostly English stuff. That Echo & the Bunnymen song, “The Killing Moon,” was on, and we lay there listening.

  “Tell me what happened in the woods,” I said after a while.

  “Go to sleep.”

  “I’m sorry if Toby scared you,” I whispered. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Greta turned farther away from me so we weren’t touching anymore. It seemed like she wasn’t going to say anything, but then, after a long wait, she cleared her throat.

  “I think I scared him more than he scared me,” she said.

  “Were you by yourself out there?” I spoke carefully. I knew that any second Greta could disappear into herself.

  “I thought it was you at first. Then there was a man’s voice. Really hoarse. He was saying my name, telling me not to be frightened. He didn’t say afraid, he said frightened. That’s when I screamed. And I can scream when I want to. Loud. He stood up, and it looked like he was thinking about running, but then he started mumbling something about Mom and Dad knowing about the portrait. He said you’d sent him. He said he was Finn’s friend. And then everything clicked into place. I tried to scramble up. I shoved the leaves off myself, but it was all mud out there. It was pouring. I slipped. I didn’t want his help, but I had no choice. I could barely keep my eyes open. And then he took his coat off—I remember that. He took his coat off and laid it on the ground and lifted me onto it. And then he told me to go back to sleep. That everything would be all right.”

  “He’s not like you think, Greta.”

  Then I told her everything I knew about our mother. All the jealousy and sadness. All the meanness that could come out of loving someone too much.

  She laughed to herself. Just a little sad puff through her nose.

  I closed my eyes and let Depeche Mode and Yaz and the Cure erase everything that had happened. I didn’t want to let my mind go beyond right now, because every time I did I saw Toby’s hapless face in the window of the police car and I couldn’t face that. Not yet.

  We lay there quiet for a long time, but I could tell neither of us could sleep. After a while Greta nudged my back.

  “What?”

  “Did you hear WPLJ banned that stupid George Michael song ‘I Want Your Sex’ because of AIDS?”

  I shook my head. “As if listening to that would ever get anyone in the mood.”

  Then we both started cracking up. We laughed until Greta fell right out of the bed. And then she kept on laughing on the floor. I couldn’t even remember the last time we laughed together like that, and I knew that it meant my sister was starting to come back. That somehow Toby had gone out into the woods and brought back Greta for me. He’d brought me back my sister.

  We listened to more music and drank brandy and cream soda, and we talked and talked, and that Saturday never did end. Not for us. We stayed up until the world started to get light again. Until we saw the pink sunrise over the top of the Gordanos’ freshly trimmed cedar hedge.

  Sixty

  I called Toby at five-thirty in the morning on Sunday. Only Greta and I were up. The phone rang and rang and I thought he was probably asleep, so I let it keep going. I let it ring twenty-three times before I finally hung up. I wasn’t really worried, because I figured he was still at the police station. It didn’t feel good to imagine him there, but I wasn’t worried. He just hadn’t gotten home yet.

  After all those hours of talking and all the brandy and cream soda, Greta and I finally crashed. We found our way to our own beds and slept until lunchtime, when my mother woke us both up.

  She knocked on my door, then eased her head in. The way she looked at me was different than I’d ever seen before. It was like she was looking at someone else. A stranger.

  “June,” she said. She said my name in a businesslike way. Calm and with purpose. “Your father and I want to move on from this.”

  I heard Toby’s voice in my head—But where would we move to?—and I’m not sure if I disguised the smile that must have rushed across my face.

  “June? Are you listening?”

  “Yes. Of course I’m listening.”

  “Tax season’s over, and after this week South Pacific is done, and we think we should start doing some more family things. Pull together for a while, until you girls seem back to normal. We haven’t been there for you. We know.”

  I wanted to say that if she hadn’t made Finn keep Toby a secret, none of this would ever have happened, but I couldn’t. It was my fault. There was no point dragging my mother into it. And, anyway, I understood exactly how she felt. I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they’d be.

  All day I kept expecting Greta to ignore me or say something snotty or mean. I waited for her to do something that proved that she hadn’t meant any of what she’d said the night before, but she didn’t. When she saw me in the kitchen she smiled. A real, actual, non-snotty smile.

  Later in the afternoon, the two of us sat on the couch, staring at the portrait.

  “Don’t tell Mom, but I kind of like it,” Greta whispered.

  I nodded. “Me too.”

  The gold in our hair looked so perfect right then, and I knew we both saw it. We could see the way it made us look like the closest of sisters. Girls made of exactly the same stuff.

  Sixty-One

  There was no answer when I called Toby that night. Or early on Monday morning. I thought maybe he’d decided to hate me because of what I’d made him do. I hoped that wasn’t true. But I thought that it might be.

  Life went back to being more normal than it had been in a long time. I wasn’t making secret trips into the city. There were no Volcano Bowls or secret rooms in basements. There wasn’t even an underground bank vault anymore. Maybe the normality of it all was the worst thing about it. I had lost Toby. He was missing, and I was the only one looking for him. He was missing, and it was my fault.

  After school on Monday I went to the library. Ben was there, checking out books for a report on Hiroshima. He was just in jeans and a plain black T-shirt. No cape. He spotted me heading for the pay phone.

  “Hey there,” he called. “Wolf Girl.”

  I put my hands on my hips and turned to look at him. “What?”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “What? Seen what?”

  “In today’s Gazette.”

  “No,” I said cautiously. Was there some kind of big article about Toby being in the woods?

  “Your wolves. They existeth no more,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Feral dogs. A whole pack of them. Scary stuff. You know that dirt road? Wrisley Road? Some old guy died out there, like, a year ago, and all his dogs—seven or eight of them—went feral.”

  I was pretty sure I knew the house he was talking about. Driving, you’d have to go up Rampatuck Road, which was dirt, to get to Wrisley Road, which was also dirt but even narrower. But if you were walking, you only had to go over that ridge past the river in the woods behind the school.

  “What happened?”

  “Some people complained about dogs getting into their garbage cans, and when the animal patrol came and saw what was going on out there, they shot them. All of them. You’re lucky you were never attacked out there.”

  “But why were they shot?”

  “Because they’re feral dogs. Hello in there. Didn’t you hear me? Dangerous things. Filthy, diseased, wild . . . What should they do, re-home them as gentle household pets?”

  “How
about just leaving them alone?”

  “Consider yourself lucky. That’s all I have to say.”

  “I don’t. I don’t consider myself lucky at all, because there was nothing to be afraid of in the first place.”

  Ben smiled, and I saw exactly what he must have been like as a little kid. “Can I still call you Wolf Girl?”

  “No,” I said, giving him the sternest look I could muster. Then, before I could help myself, I said, “Why don’t you call Tina Yarwood Wolf Girl? I’m sure she’d let you.”

  Great. Now I looked like a complete jealous idiot. Over Ben Dellahunt, of all people. I didn’t even care about Ben Dellahunt. He was okay, he had a few good points, but that was as far as it went.

  He seemed confused. “Why would I call Tina anything?”

  I shuffled my feet, wanting to leave. “Well, you’re going out with her, right?”

  “Uh, you do know she’s my cousin? I know you’re into the whole Middle Ages thing, but . . .”

  “Oh . . . No, I didn’t know that. God. Obviously that’s gross. Like so gross . . . I’m sorry, I—”

  “Okay, okay. You didn’t know. Whatever. No need for total mortification.”

  “Yeah, all right. I mean it, though. I didn’t know. I’m not into that kind of thing or anything, okay?”

  Ben put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my face. “June, do you think I believe you’d be into dating relatives? Really? You have seriously got to find a way to lighten up. Listen, next weekend, after the play’s all over with, you can come over to my house and we’ll roll you a character. No obligations. We’ll just roll, see what happens. What do you say? I’m pegging you as maybe assassin material.” He took a step back, tilting his head and squinting at me. For a second it reminded me of the way Finn looked at a piece of art and I smiled, which probably gave Ben the wrong idea, because he smiled back. “Elf assassin . . . with magic. We’ll hope for a good charisma roll, and I’d be willing to fudge the constitution numbers to give you a fair chance. What do you say?”

  I realized I was twirling one of my braids in my fingers and I let it go. I looked down, away from Ben, and mumbled, “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll do it.”

  It felt good to say yes. To agree to something so ordinary. To agree to spend some time with a guy who didn’t think it was possible I might want to date my relatives. For a few minutes I stood there with Ben and I forgot about everything terrible. Then he said goodbye and turned and left, and it all came rushing back.

  I walked out to the pay phone in the lobby and called Toby. Still no answer. Then I tried again, dialing more carefully, thinking that maybe I’d been getting the number wrong. But, no, it rang and rang until I hung up.

  I ran home from the library and went straight to the mailbox. I would have given anything to find a letter from one of Toby’s crazy places. The League of Volcano Bowl Drinkers, The Miyagi-San Appreciation Society, Golden Hands United. Anything. But there were just two bills and a Grand Union flyer.

  A few minutes after I got inside, my mother was on the phone, calling from work, making sure I was there.

  Greta was staying late at school, because there were South Pacific performances at seven o’clock on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights that week. So I sat alone at the kitchen table and pulled out my homework. Geometry proofs. I drew a line down my paper and made two columns.

  I looked at the problem sheet. Postulates. Axioms. Congruence. The words sat there. Pointless and dead. I tapped my pencil against the paper. Then, instead of working out two separate proofs of Pythagoras’s theorem, I wrote: Proof for Why It Is Impossible That I Will Never See Toby Again. I looked at it for a few seconds. I wanted it to be an easy proof. Like the one for showing that a straight line is always a 180-degree angle. But it wasn’t like that. I could only come up with arguments for the other side.

  Like, what if the police had taken Toby straight from our house to the airport and shoved him on a plane back to England? Or what if he packed his stuff up and left to go someplace I’d never know? Or what if the police had beaten him up and were keeping him in a deep dark cell so nobody would find out? Or what if it was worse? What if it was something I couldn’t even imagine?

  “No,” I said out loud, before crumpling the paper in my hand. Then I tried his number again. It just rang and rang.

  Sixty-Two

  I could come up with a list of reasons why I’d made that phone call to Toby on Saturday night. Convincing reasons. Reasons that would be easy to believe. I was worried about Greta. It seemed like the best option. I panicked. There are more. I could come up with more in an instant. But underneath all of them is the reason I’m afraid of. The one that still haunts me at night. The one that still wanders around dressed in wolf ’s clothing. Baring sharp, shiny teeth.

  The one I don’t want to believe is that I did it on purpose. That I called because of all those Sundays I waited for the phone to ring. All those Sundays I imagined Finn was probably having the time of his life with Toby. I called because of how embarrassing it must have been for Finn to have me fawning over him all the time. I called because sometimes I imagined I could hear them laughing. At me. At every dumb thing about me. How funny it was that I didn’t know a thing about the two of them. How hilarious it was that I had feelings for my own uncle. I lay in bed at night and I could hear Finn’s beautiful laugh in my ears. “Hm-hm-hm,” his laugh went. Like he’d swallowed the sun. I called because I could hear it so clearly. And I wanted more of it and I didn’t want any of it. I’m not a jealous person. That’s what I used to say. That’s what I used to believe.

  But maybe I am. Maybe that’s exactly what I am. Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. And maybe that’s what it meant. Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they’ll find you anyway. They always do.

  I started to think that maybe my mother and I aren’t really so different. Not in our hearts. And maybe Toby was the one who got the worst of it. I say maybe, but really I know it’s true. I knew he’d go when I called. I knew it was dangerous, and I knew he’d do anything to keep a promise to Finn.

  I used to believe in all the good reasons I made that call on that stupid stormy Saturday night, but with each day that passed, with each Tobyless day, I lost that belief. I started to know the truth.

  That night I didn’t sleep. I snuck downstairs every hour and tried Toby. Each time, the phone rang and rang. In my dark night kitchen, I could imagine it ringing out into Finn’s messy apartment. Trilling over the dirty plates, around the books, and over the Turkish carpet. Searching and searching for the right ears to hear.

  Sixty-Three

  “Have you heard anything?” Greta had come over to sit with me in the school cafeteria. It was the first time that had ever happened, and it was nice.

  I shook my head.

  “He’ll turn up,” she said. “Here.” She handed me half of her sandwich.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Come on, you have to eat.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t.”

  Greta nodded. “It’s not your fault, June, okay? He’s an adult.”

  “He’s sick.” I was about to say that I was supposed to be taking care of him, but I knew that was something only I would ever know.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. She put her arm on my shoulder, like girls do sometimes. Other girls, real girls.

  Wednesday. It had been four days since I’d last seen Toby. I hated myself.

  I found the number for the police station in the phone book. I asked for Officer Gellski and they put me through.

  I told him I was wondering, just out of curiosity, if he could tell me what happened to Tobias Aldshaw after he left our house on Saturday night.

  “You a friend of Mr. Aldshaw’s?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what I should say. I didn’t
want to do anything at all to make things worse for Toby, but there was a place in me, right in the center of my heart, that wanted to yell out that he was my friend. I wanted to tell that cop that he was actually my best friend. That I had no better friend in the world than Tobias Aldshaw. But then I didn’t. I didn’t say that.

  “I’m Greta Elbus’s sister. Mr. Aldshaw was a good friend of my uncle’s. I knew him a little.”

  He didn’t say anything at first. “Okay. Okay then. Well, we were going to hold him here until the morning, but . . .” He paused, and I could feel him thinking about whether to go on. “Well, your mother, she told us about the AIDS, and, to tell you the truth, everybody wanted to get him out of here as soon as possible.”

  “So you just let him go?”

  “The guy was burning up. Fever. Like I said, if it wasn’t for the AIDS, we would have kept him awhile.”

  He kept calling it the AIDS, like it was some kind of animal or household appliance.

  “Are you saying you let him go?”

  “Ambulance. The EMTs picked him up.”

  “Do you know where they took him?”

  “Not sure. With the AIDS and all, they might have shipped him right to the city.”

  “Is there a way I could find out which hospital?”

  “Yeah, hold on a sec.” He had a loud voice, and I could hear him calling across the room, then the mumble of someone answering.

  “Yeah, Bellevue. In the city. Like I said, probably they took him right down there because of the AIDS.”

  “It’s AIDS,” I said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I said.”

  “It’s AIDS. It’s not the AIDS.”

  “Okay, kid. Whatever you want.”

  I called the hospital. I asked for Toby by his real name, which I’d been turning around in my head since Saturday, when I first heard it. Tobias Aldshaw. It sounded like the name of somebody famous, not the name of an invisible man who had nobody in the world except me.