Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “Back inside with you,” I tell her softly over the rain.

  She cocks her head, watching me. Places a possessive paw on the deer.

  “Funny little thing.” Duncan grins.

  She returns to the den to await instruction from her mother. She is one of the most important wolves in this country. Born here, she and her siblings have a true chance of making this land their home, and a home for their children to come.

  * * *

  “You don’t like them, do you?”

  “I mind the wee ones a little less after today, I suppose.”

  “But why? Why don’t you like them?”

  “The people here are good people, and they work hard. I don’t like to see them scared. Fear makes for danger, whether it was there to begin with or not.”

  9

  I must be expecting Duncan because I quicken, and I don’t like how eager I feel, but it’s Stuart Burns knocking at my door. Aggie is in bed and I wasn’t far from it, cleaning the kitchen after dinner and desperate for my pillow. When she is well she does a lot of the cooking and cleaning while I’m at work, but when she isn’t, when she’s too tired, I do it all in the hours before bed.

  “I’d like a word, Miss Flynn,” Stuart says. Instead of risking waking my sister, I step outside and close the door. Stuart towers over me and my skin prickles, here alone with him.

  “You owe me two thousand pounds.” His tone is neither the friendly one I first met nor the seething fury of the pub; it is neutral, controlled.

  “I know, Stuart. I need time to save it up. The job doesn’t pay much.”

  “Call your parents, I’m sure they could help.”

  I frown. “You don’t know a thing about what my parents could do.”

  “Look, just figure it out, ’cause I’m losing patience.” He moves closer, enjoying his size, and I fucking loathe this thing men do so I don’t step back like he wants me to, I raise my chin.

  “Get off my property.”

  “Get the money you owe me. And don’t bring it to the house, I don’t want you bothering my wife. I’ll come calling on you each night until you have it, make it easy for you.”

  He gets in his car and drives away.

  I don’t have a conscious thought as such, but my feet start moving and when I reach Duncan’s house my hands are so cold it hurts to knock on his door.

  He doesn’t say anything when he sees me.

  Then, “You blow mighty hot and cold, wolf girl.”

  He’s right, I do, I am rudderless. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll go.”

  He takes my hand to stay me.

  * * *

  We don’t sleep, but lie naked at opposite ends of his bed, lamp lit and warm from the fireplace in his room. It smells of wood smoke and a scent that powerfully calls to mind my father’s workshop, a scent I can’t name but makes me feel at home. Fingal sleeps on the rug before the fire, his tail twitching every so often to the shape of his dreams.

  In this soft light I could look at Duncan’s face for hours, forever.

  “Is this how you keep your lovers?” he asks me. “Waiting for scraps?”

  I hide my smile. “Don’t say lovers.” Then, “What about yours.”

  “What about them?”

  “How did you love them?”

  He considers, holding my foot in his palm. “Not as well as I should have.”

  I wait.

  “The few women I’ve known always seemed to want something I wasn’t able to give, and that was my fault, probably, not being clear enough about that. Masquerading as a whole man, as one of them told me.”

  I am taken aback. I want to ask what he means, what makes him less than whole.

  “They all … we skated the surface. I don’t think I knew who they were, nor them me, and that’s as I wanted it. And then it would come, like clockwork, to the same moment. I’d tell them I don’t want children and they wouldn’t believe me, they thought I needed time and maybe that’s the right way for a lot of men, maybe they don’t know themselves and that’s certainly true of me, but it’s also true that I can’t reconcile myself as a father, I think maybe I’d be too much like mine and that’d be unforgivable.”

  I know what he’s talking about. I know it intimately. When I turned thirty, almost to the day, I started thinking about a child. Something in my body said Now, now, this is why you’re here, this is the meaning. An urgent clock I hadn’t believed was real until I felt its chiming. The cells of me wanted to nurture, they wanted to love and protect. Aggie didn’t share this call of the body, she didn’t feel the panic I did. As it turned out, she would be robbed of the ability to have children and that same event would vanish the need in me, disappear it so thoroughly it was like it had never existed at all. All things good, taken.

  Duncan lifts my foot to his lips and kisses it; I close my eyes.

  “What about your mother?” I ask. “What was she like?”

  “She was kind,” he says. “That’s what I remember best. You couldn’t offend her. She cared about everyone, even if they didn’t behave well. In the face of anything, she had compassion to offer. It’s a kind of strength I think women know better than men, maybe.”

  “Not all women.”

  There is a silence and then he asks, “What whim brought you tonight?”

  “Stuart Burns was on my doorstep.”

  Duncan tenses. “Why was that?”

  “To collect his money, which I didn’t have.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “He’s not a good man, Duncan.”

  “Next time he comes round you call me. I can be there in minutes.”

  “I didn’t come here because I was frightened, that’s not what I meant. I can look after myself.”

  I don’t know if this is true, actually, in fact I strongly suspect it’s not, but he says, “I know you can,” and sounds like he means it.

  I crawl to his end of the bed so my face is near to his. His fingers trail my spine. He has large, thick hands, rough fingers, and yet his touch is light. “Did you care about those women who left you?”

  His hand reaches my neck, my jaw, my lips. “’Course. I just wasn’t enough for them.”

  I cannot imagine in this moment how that could be possible.

  “Why then. If not Stuart,” he asks.

  Why did I come here.

  My lips brush the corner of his mouth. Why.

  This will have to be the last time my feet find their way to his door.

  * * *

  After the trembling giant, Dad was lucid for the longest stretch of time since we’d moved to BC, and I began to hope. Maybe he had been returned to us permanently. Underneath I knew this was foolish and that we were biding time here. At nearly eighteen Aggie and I had finished school and so we spent our time on the work of survival, the three of us, pretending life was normal.

  It first happened on a night in the cellar, bottling preserved peaches. Aggie was making Dad repeat words in Spanish and laughing at his pronunciation. I was inspecting a scrape on my calf—given to me by a rusty bit of metal and now growing steadily infected—and scheming how I could go to town for antibiotics without Dad knowing. And so I wasn’t looking. But something smashed and there was a short scream.

  I looked up. Made sense of it. One of the bottles had slipped between my sister’s fingers and shattered into a thousand pieces. And my father had hit Aggie across the face hard enough to leave a red mark on her cheek. They were staring at each other in shock, in disbelief because this had never happened, not ever, not my gentle father who laughed when we made mistakes, smiled kindly when we broke things.

  A shadow moved in the cellar. A pall coming over us.

  Dad left. Aggie touched her cheek once, as though to imprint the feel of it to her palm, and then she started cleaning up the glass.

  I said nothing, didn’t move, too aware of my sister’s pain and how this time of all times I hadn’t shared it with her.

  * * *

>   It became a pattern. Something broke in my father’s mind. The essence of who he was changed. Mum might have called it his animal but in truth it was all too human. Frustrated. Frightened. Shamed. And violent. Something would feel wrong to him, something was forgotten or remembered suddenly, his vulnerability became too much for him and he took it out on Aggie. A slap or a shove. It was so strange as to be like a dream we floated through, colored mostly by disbelief. I didn’t know why it was only directed at Aggie, perhaps because she had always been tougher, but I made sure to watch every small act of violence so I might share it with her, and at first this felt like solidarity, my support of her, but after a fortnight and a blow so hard it split her lip I knew that what I should be doing instead of watching was protecting her.

  “It’s time for a home,” I said in the dawn of the third week.

  Aggie rolled over to face me; we still slept in our shared room on the single beds we grew up in. “You said you didn’t want him in one of those.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I said. And maybe we should call Mum, too.”

  “God no. She’d just turn this into something it’s not.”

  It was something, it was all things. We couldn’t trust him anymore, and that was the worst betrayal of all.

  We rose and padded, both of us barefoot, to the hallway outside Dad’s room. Are you sure? Aggie signed to me.

  I nodded.

  But when we opened the door his bed was empty.

  * * *

  It took us nearly a week of searching the surrounding land before we could admit he was gone. On that first morning it was plain to see that his favorite horse had been taken from the stables and for a day or two we were able to follow his trail, but soon it disappeared, whether by bad luck or by his design, and it became painfully clear that wherever he went was not a place he intended us to follow. Still we searched, in wide, arcing circles.

  In the deep parts of our bodies we knew that he had taken himself off to die quietly and without fuss, like an animal. Maybe to put an end to whatever he was becoming, to exert what little control he had left. Or maybe to protect us in the only way he knew how.

  I did not think we would see him again, and we didn’t. Our father.

  10

  I am filling Aggie’s sertraline script when Lainey Burns steps into the pharmacy. I take some pamphlets off the counter for counseling services in nearby Aviemore; Aggie is going to need a new doctor soon, and maybe I can arrange for someone to do a house call. Then I walk to where Lainey stands in the painkiller aisle.

  “Hi.”

  She sees me and smiles a real smile. “Hi.”

  All the swelling around her eye has gone down and the black bruises have been covered as well as they can be by makeup. “Nice artwork,” I say, with a nod to her arm cast. It’s adorned with colorful doodles of flowers and animals.

  Lainey laughs a little. “Stuart’s handiwork.”

  I must look surprised because her smile disappears. “People aren’t always what they first seem.”

  Well she’s certainly right about that.

  “How’s Gealaich?”

  “She’s okay. Still skittish. She won’t let me go near her.”

  “Give her time. She got a fright.”

  My mouth opens but I can’t find the right words. So I just ask, “Are you okay, Lainey?”

  She doesn’t get angry. She meets my eyes. “I am. Are you, Inti?”

  I don’t say her husband’s been scaring the living shit out of me each time he sits in his car outside my house at night, because I’d be willing to bet Lainey’s dealing with worse. “I am. Thanks.”

  I see her glance at the pamphlets in my hand and look at me a touch differently. I don’t explain they’re for my sister, or that I don’t expect they’ll help her. The bell over the door rings and then Stuart is here.

  “Came to see what was taking so long,” he says, eyeing me.

  “Sorry,” Lainey says. “I’m ready.”

  “I told you to stay away from my wife,” he addresses me.

  “What is it you think I’m gonna do—corrupt her?”

  “We ran into each other,” Lainey says. “Inti just said hello, that’s all.”

  “All right, all’s well, then.” Stuart puts the aspirin his wife was holding back on the shelf and then steers her toward the door. “Goodnight, Mrs. Doyle, you have a braw night now,” he calls to the old woman at the counter. Polite as pie.

  I follow them.

  The pharmacy is opposite the Snow Goose. Outside it stand Red McRae and Mayor Oakes, smoking a cigarette with their pints in hand. The streetlight above us is out so when I say Stuart’s name and he stops to face me we are in shadow. Lainey hangs back warily.

  I have only one thought. If she won’t report him then I will provoke him until I have something I can report. I will turn the direction of his anger from Lainey to me.

  “What do you do out there?” I ask. “When you lurk outside my house at night, just beyond the fence so you won’t get in trouble. What are you thinking about? Do you get pleasure from the thought of intimidating me like that? Does it get you off?”

  “Shut your filthy mouth,” he says. “I’m just after what I’m owed.”

  “It must be what turns you on, huh? The thought of scaring women. Only we’re not scared. I’m not scared of you, Stuart. I think you’re pathetic. I stand by my window and watch you out there and I fucking laugh.”

  Several things happen at once. He steps toward me and this is it, I brace myself with a thrill of victory and a flash of hot fear, and from the corner of my eye I can see Red and Andy crossing the street and Lainey reaching for her husband’s arm, but they’re not going to stop him and we both know it. It’s a voice sliding into the space between the lamplights, that’s what stops him.

  “How come I wasn’t invited to the party?”

  Stuart releases his clenched fist.

  We both turn to look at Duncan.

  “No party here,” Stuart says. “Just a little girl making trouble.”

  Duncan is between us. To me he says, “Go and wait for me in the pub.”

  “No, I—”

  “Inti.”

  Goddamn it.

  I cross the street, vibrating with adrenaline. That was so close. I cast a look back at the small group, but I can no longer hear what Duncan is saying to them, can only make out their shapes. Lainey is leaving now too, walking quickly down the street, and it occurs to me that Duncan is there alone now, outnumbered, and I wonder if I should go back, and then I remind myself not to be silly. He’s a cop, and they’re—for the most part—normal people. His friends, probably. I go inside.

  Warm air blasts my cheeks. The wash of voices. I get myself a glass of wine from the bar and sink onto the peeling leather cushion of a booth. I’m so hot I must wrench my scarf and coat off before I can breathe again. Painful minutes pass by as I wait for him, imagining what could be taking place outside. If he is simply sending them home then why is he taking so long, and why did he separate Lainey from her husband, and the longer he takes the more certain I am that I will go back out there; I am grabbing my scarf and coat once more when Duncan slides into the booth opposite me.

  He has a bruise on his cheek, a split lip. “What the hell are you doing?” he asks.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Bullshit. I can see you.”

  I close my mouth. My face is so hot.

  “I tell you to mind him and you go aggravating him in the street at night? I’ll say it again. You stay away from Stuart Burns, do you understand?” I have never heard his voice like this, I think under that anger he is afraid.

  “Who did that to you?” I ask.

  A waitress brings him a beer; I don’t know if he ordered it when he came in or if she just knew what he’d want. He nods his thanks but keeps his eyes on me until she’s left. “Have you got a bone to pick with me?”

  “I do.”

  “Go on then, let’s have it. Say your pie
ce.”

  I take a mouthful of wine and it warms me. I live in his hands on his glass, his back on the cushion, his thin T-shirt against my collarbones, his bruise and his blood and his mouth as it touches his beer. I thought I had control but this is what he does to me. Despite my vow, and the guilt that leaving Aggie brings me, I have been slipping through the woods to his house too often.

  “What are you so frightened of, Duncan?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “I think you must be frightened. Being who you are. And not doing anything about what you know.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Anything.”

  “What if I’ve done it?”

  I lift fingers to my cheek, feeling the ache. “What have you done?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You must be frightened,” I repeat.

  “We’re all frightened.”

  “Is that the excuse you make for him?”

  “Just a fact.”

  “He’s a monster,” I say.

  “You’re giving him too much credit. He’s just a man,” Duncan says.

  “That’s dangerous. That’s how you let people do terrible things.”

  He doesn’t take to this. “I’m not minimizing. It’s just that if you paint a picture of him as a monster then you make him mythical, but men who hurt women are just men. They’re all of us. Too fucking many of us and all too human. And the women they hurt aren’t passive victims, or Freud’s masochists who like to be punished either. They’re all women, and all they’re doing, minute by minute, is strategizing how best to survive the man they loved, and that’s not a thing anyone should have to do.”

  It’s not what I expected to come from his mouth. I keep underestimating him.

  Duncan probes his bruise and I flinch. “Don’t.”

  He may understand some things but he doesn’t know what it feels like to live in that fear. “Have you ever hurt a woman who loved you?”