Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  The hospital told me he was unavailable. They told me his room number was 2763 and that I should call back later.

  “What do you mean, ‘unavailable’?” I asked.

  “No idea. There’s just no answer when I try putting the call through,” the nurse said. “Could be tests. He could be sleeping. Try later.”

  “He’s okay though? Right? He’s still a patient.”

  I heard the nurse shuffling through some papers.

  “His name’s still on the register. Try later.”

  My mother had tickets to all the performances of South Pacific. My dad and I went to only one, but she wanted to see it as many times as she could. My mother and Greta got back at around nine-thirty and Greta showered and changed. My parents finished watching the ten o’clock news, then went up to bed. I’d been in my room all night, and when I heard my father’s snoring kick in, I snuck downstairs.

  I dragged the phone out the back door, so I was crouched down under Greta’s bedroom window, and I called straight through to Toby’s hospital room. I expected it to ring and ring, because after all these days it seemed hard to believe that Toby would really pick up. But he did.

  I could hardly hear him at first. His voice was almost gone. He cleared his throat then tried again. “Hello?”

  “Toby?”

  “June?”

  “Oh, Toby, I’m so, so glad—”

  “June, I buggered it all up, didn’t I? I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? I dragged you out there and now . . . Are you okay? You must hate me.”

  “June. Of course not.”

  “I didn’t know where you were. I had no idea what happened to you.”

  “I couldn’t ring your house. Not after—”

  “It was a bad idea. The worst idea. I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Are you sick? What did the police do to you?”

  “I’m all right,” he said, but the sound of his voice said something different. He sounded wheezy, like he was trying as hard as he could not to cough. “And you? You and Greta?”

  “We’re okay. Don’t worry about us.” I wrapped and unwrapped the curly phone cord around my finger.

  “Good. That’s good.”

  Then we both went quiet, and I thought that it felt hard to talk to Toby, in a way it never had before.

  “When will you be back home?” I asked.

  He coughed, and it sounded horrible. All chesty and deep. I listened while he struggled to get his breathing back to normal.

  “June, listen, I might not be going back. . . .”

  “Of course you will,” I said, but I was starting to get scared. “I’m in huge trouble right now, but I’ll figure something out. I’ll come down as soon as I can, okay?”

  “June, I’m serious. I might not—”

  “Why wouldn’t you? Your guitar’s there, and your fleas, your little mates, and—”

  “June . . .”

  “No, Toby. No. Because I still need to take you to the Cloisters, and then when you’re feeling better you can meet Greta properly. You have to. There’s no choice.”

  “June . . .”

  Toby’s voice trailed off and he started to cough again. He kept hacking and hacking, and I heard a nurse saying something to him in the background.

  I wanted to tell him all of what had happened over the last few days. I wanted to find more ways to say I was sorry. And I wanted to make us both believe that he would be going home. But I sat out there without saying anything. The moon was a sliver, and there was no breeze at all. I stared out, watching powdery gray moths fluttering up against the patio light.

  I felt tears welling up. “Toby?”

  But he kept coughing and coughing until I couldn’t bear to listen anymore.

  “Toby, look, I’m coming. As soon as I can, okay? Just hang on. Please wait.”

  “No, June. I’ll be fine. I’m being stupid. Don’t get yourself into more trouble.”

  “Just wait for me, okay? Please?”

  When I looked up, Greta was staring down at me from her open window. We looked at each other for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “Will you come with me?” I whispered up to her.

  She closed the window and breathed out onto the glass. With her finger, she wrote, yes into the fog. Without even thinking about it, she’d written it backward, mirror image, so it looked perfect to me.

  That night, Greta drove. We waited until after midnight, after our parents would be sound asleep. I wasn’t worried about getting into trouble. There was no bigger trouble left to get in. And Toby had nobody. In his world, I, June Elbus, was it, and I was going to put everything right. I was going to undo all the mess I’d gotten him into.

  It was a clear, warm night. Greta rolled our dad’s car out of the driveway and, like she did with everything, like she always could, she managed to drive as if she’d been doing it for years, even though she’d only just gotten her permit. We drove down the empty Saw Mill Parkway, and Greta pushed in my parents’ Simon and Garfunkel cassette. I got out two cigarettes from my bag. I pushed in the car lighter and waited.

  “What will you do when you get there?” Greta asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  I tried to believe her. I tried to believe I had the power to make the story end any way I wanted it to. I pushed the tip of each cigarette against the lighter, then I breathed each one to life.

  “Here,” I said, passing one to Greta.

  “You know, the smoking. It surprised me.”

  “Just something I picked up,” I said, grinning, and I realized that Toby was shining through me so strongly then that for a moment I was almost completely invisible.

  Sixty-Four

  Up until then, all the times I’d been in the city at night was with Finn. Once he took me to see a special showing of It’s a Wonderful Life at Radio City Music Hall. Another time we went to La Bohème at Lincoln Center. And another time, not too long ago, our whole family met him in the city and we went out for a huge Italian meal for my mother’s birthday. The city at night was supposed to have Finn in it. So somehow I thought he might be there. Not really, but so much a part of the night city that I would feel him there. But that wasn’t what it felt like. It was just Greta and me standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, me fishing in my pocket for the key on the red ribbon.

  We had decided to stop at Finn’s apartment first. I wanted to bring Toby a change of clothes. Plus, we realized we had no idea where Bellevue Hospital was.

  I imagined the apartment would be a wreck. Worse than last time. I was getting ready to explain it to Greta somehow, to make excuses for Toby, but when I pushed open the door the place was neater than I’d ever seen it. Everything in the right spot. No clothes draped over chairs. No saucers heaped with tea bags and cigarettes. Even the stale smell was gone. The big windows were open a few inches, letting in a breeze that must have been working to freshen the air. I tried not to act too surprised.

  “This is weird,” Greta said. “Being here like this.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking that she didn’t even know how weird it was, because she hadn’t seen the mess the place was just a few weeks ago.

  I grabbed a plastic bag from the kitchen and walked down the hall to the bedroom to get some clothes. The door was closed, like it used to be, and I gently pushed it open and walked over to the chest of drawers. Greta followed behind me.

  “So this is the private bedroom,” she said.

  The bed was made and the cigarette packs were gone from Toby’s side table. Greta was about to open the closet, but I put my hand on hers.

  “Let’s not,” I said. “Okay?”

  Greta looked up Bellevue in the phone book. It turned out that it was pretty far downtown and all the way over near the river on the East Side.

  “We should go,” I said. I was standing near the door, looking across the living room. I shivered, because it was late and I was
tired but also because I had a sudden feeling that it might be the last time I saw that place. But I couldn’t let myself focus on that. Greta was walking around, looking at every little thing. Like a detective looking for clues. “Come on,” I said.

  We drove all the way down West End Avenue, right past where it turns into 11th Avenue, until we got to 23rd Street. At that time of night, West End was quiet. Almost creepy. And in my father’s smooth sedan it felt like we were floating slightly above the city.

  By the time we got to Bellevue it was almost two in the morning. Greta pulled up on a side street.

  “Go ahead home,” I said.

  “You can’t go all by yourself.”

  “You’ve already had a show, you must be totally exhausted. Plus you have to tell Mom and Dad where I am. They’ll go crazy if we’re both missing in the morning.”

  She seemed to think about that for a few seconds.

  “I want to make sure you get up there first. Then I’ll go. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  I was about to walk right through the big automatic sliding doors, but Greta stopped me. “Look, hospitals don’t let anyone visit any time of day or night,” she said. “Just wait.”

  Greta pulled me away from the doors, over to the side. She put her hands on both my shoulders and looked at me. And it felt so good. In the middle of that terrible night, there was nothing better than feeling Greta’s hands on my shoulders. Having her teach me how to do something the right way. I felt tears pushing their way into my eyes. I felt my legs go soft and weak. Greta squeezed my shoulders.

  “Stop,” she said.

  I nodded, wiping my face with my sleeve.

  “It’s all going to work out fine. They’ll ask you who you are. If you’re a relative.” Greta kept looking at me. Then she neatened up my hair a little bit and looked at me some more. “Okay. This is what you should do. Tell them you’re his sister. From England. He called you and said he thought he was in really bad shape. You’re the only one he has and you’re not sure how much longer he has left. Okay? Put on an accent. Not a stupid one. Try to imitate Toby or something.”

  I thought of how Toby talked. Not with the regular English accent, but the kind where all his u’s sounded like the oo’s in books.

  “What about you?” I said.

  “I’ll keep an eye on you. Make sure they let you up. Then I’ll drive back home.”

  “Mom and Dad will kill you. What are you going to tell them?”

  “I’ll sneak in, and if you’re not back by the time they wake up, I’ll figure something out. I’ll worry about all that. You just go, okay?”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “Now, remember, the trick is to walk in like you expect to be let in. Like you belong there. Got it?”

  I nodded again and let those big white doors open for me.

  Bellevue did not look like the kind of hospital a person would choose to go to if they had any other option. Part of the lobby was having work done on it, and there were roped-off areas with signs that said EXCUSE OUR APPEARANCE . . . But there was no excuse. Most of the chairs had rips in their orange vinyl seats, and in one corner there was a bucket under a brown water stain in the ceiling. People were slumped on chairs sleeping. A mother held a toddler bundled up tight in a blanket that looked like it used to be pink. One guy looked like he might have been shot in the arm. He sat there wincing, pressing a brightly patterned beach towel against his upper arm. A TV bolted onto a shelf near the ceiling played an episode of Columbo, but there was no sound.

  Bellevue seemed like the kind of place where they wouldn’t really care who visited when or where. It didn’t look like the kind of place where the staff would notice much of anything. But it also looked big. Too big to find Toby by myself. So I walked through that lobby to the information desk.

  It was just like Greta said. The receptionist tried to send me away, but then I did everything Greta told me to and it worked. I headed down the hallway to the elevator and glanced back toward the lobby. There was Greta, legs crossed, sitting next to a lady who looked about thirteen months pregnant. Greta had a magazine held up high over her face, and when I squinted I saw it was our issue of Newsweek. I laughed, then put my hand over my mouth to stifle it. Greta lowered the magazine, looked up at me for a second, and smiled. As the elevator door started to close, she stood and put up one hand to wave goodbye. That’s one of those frozen memories for me, because there was something in Greta’s solemn wave that made me understand it was about something bigger. That as the elevator door eclipsed the look between us, we were really saying goodbye to the girls we used to be. Girls who knew how to play invisible mermaids, who could run through dark aisles, pretending to save the world.

  Toby was on a wing on the eighth floor. It looked like the place they were putting all the guys with AIDS. I knew it wasn’t polite, but it was impossible not to stare into each room as I walked by. In almost every bed there was a man. Most of them were alone, but one or two had people sitting in the room with them. The light, sweet sound of violin music was drifting out of one of the rooms, and when I looked in I saw a man staring right back at me. When he saw me, he tried to turn his head away, then gave up and closed his eyes instead.

  I peeked into Toby’s room and saw him lying there. The room was dim. The only brightness came from a small fluorescent light above the sink. His face was gray, his hair more featherlike than I’d ever seen it. He was wearing an oxygen mask, which I hadn’t expected.

  His eyes were open, and when he saw me he pulled the mask off his face and smiled as big and genuine as ever. It was the same way he’d smiled at me that very first afternoon at the train station. Like he couldn’t believe his luck. The difference was that this time it took effort. This time he managed to hold it for only a couple of seconds before it slipped away. I took a few steps into the room, never taking my eyes off Toby, and I felt myself falling apart. My eyes started watering up and my hand went over my mouth.

  “Out. Try again,” Toby said in the hoarsest voice ever, angling his eyes toward the door.

  I nodded and dashed out of the room. In the hallway I stood against the wall, bent at the waist, heaving. I slowed down my breathing. Okay, okay, okay, I said to myself. I blew out a long breath, trying not to think about this being all my fault. I had to stop thinking about that or I would never be able to step back into the room. I breathed in and out nice and slow a few more times, then turned and went in.

  Toby had turned his back to the door. Maybe he was trying to give me a chance to ease into the room. Or maybe it was just that he couldn’t bear to look at me anymore.

  I stood watching his blanket move up and down to the rhythm of his wheezy breathing. I slowly walked over to the side of the bed and bent in close, pressing my ear against his back.

  “You came,” he said into the silence.

  “I brought you some clothes,” I said, holding up the bag even though he was looking the other way. “For when it’s time to go home.”

  Toby turned his head and smiled, but it looked painful because his lips were so dry. He started coughing and I poured him a glass of water.

  “Shhh. It’s okay,” I said.

  “Here, help me up a bit, would you?”

  At first I stood there awkwardly, not knowing how to help. Then I slid my arms under his body and scooted him up on the bed. I’d expected that it would take some effort, but there was nothing at all left to Toby. The lightness of his body was so shocking that I had to try hard not to gasp out loud. It felt like I could have lifted him right up and out of that bed with barely any effort at all.

  I fluffed his pillows and wedged them behind his back so he was propped up to sit.

  “Is that better?” I asked.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  I pulled the chair as close to the bed as I could get it and wrapped a spare blanket around myself. “The apartment is clean.”

  “Why, June, you sound surprised.” He’d put on an offended-housewife voice
, but it was in a hoarse whisper, so it sounded like an offended housewife who smoked five packs of cigarettes a day. I laughed.

  “It looks good. Like it used to when Finn was there.”

  Toby smiled. Then his smile faded. He took another sip of water, but even that made him cough. After a while the cough turned into a frail kind of bark. He held his side, squinting in pain, and he looked at me, his dark eyes bigger and deeper than ever. His face was all eyes now, and he stared at me for too long. Like time had slowed right down for him. After a while he reached his hand out for mine, then he held it, rubbing his thumb over my palm.

  “This isn’t your fault, you know. You do know that, don’t you? This would have happened anyway. Maybe in a month. Two months.”

  I looked down. I stared at Toby’s long fingers in my hand. At the swirled linoleum squares of the floor.

  “How can you say this isn’t my fault?” I asked in a whisper. “How can you keep being so nice to me when I’m . . . I’m just not a good person. Can’t you see that?”

  “Oh, June.”

  “I keep trying to think of some way to make it up to you—”

  “Shhh,” he said, reaching for my other hand. “Shhh.” He started hacking again, and I sat there, helpless. He pointed to a shelf across the room. I looked and there was a half-empty roll of butterscotch Life Savers. I nudged one out with my fingernail, then put it in Toby’s mouth. My fingers brushed his lips, and they were so rough and dry it almost made me pull my hand back. After a while the coughing stopped, and he looked at me and gave a soft laugh. I sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Do you know that all this time I’ve been waiting for some way I could do something huge and magnificent for you? But it never happened. And then the one thing you finally asked me for I couldn’t do. I never dreamed you’d ask me to take you to England.”

  “No, I was taking you. I wanted to take you.”

  “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “But I knew I wouldn’t be able to bring you home. Even if we somehow worked out every other reason why we couldn’t go, I knew I wouldn’t get back into the country. I’ve outstayed my visa by a good number of years now. And then there’s the criminal record. They’re not so good with that sort of thing at immigration control. I couldn’t do that, do you see? I couldn’t let you find your way home all by yourself. Finn wouldn’t have wanted that. I wouldn’t have. If things were different . . .”