Tell The Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

Going into the woods by yourself is the best way to pretend you’re in another time. It’s a thing you can only do alone.

The first thing I do when I get to the woods is hang my backpack on a tree branch. Then I walk. To make it work you have to walk until you can’t hear any cars at all, and that’s what I do. I walk and walk until all I can hear are the little cracks and snaps of branches and the swish of the brook. I follow the brook to a place where there’s a crumbling dry stone wall and a tall maple tree with a rusted-out sap bucket nailed just above head height. That’s my place. That’s where I stop. In the book A Wrinkle in Time, it says that time is like a big old rumpled blanket. What I’d like is to be caught in one of those wrinkles. Tucked away. Hidden in a small tight fold.

Usually I put myself in the Middle Ages. Usually England. Sometimes I sing snatches of the Requiem to myself, even though I know the Requiem isn’t medieval. And I look at everything—rocks, fallen leaves, dead trees—like I have the power to read those things. Like my life depends on understanding exactly what the forest has to say.

I make sure I bring along an old Gunne Sax dress of Greta’s from when she was twelve. It’s way too small for me, so I have to wear a shirt underneath and keep the buttons open at the back. It looks more like something out of Little House on the Prairie than anything medieval, but it’s the best I can do. And then there’s ...

“He’s here,” she said. Her voice was a strange combination of anger and panic. My father parked the car and looked out the window. “Where?” “Right there, can’t you see him? On his own, on the side there.” My father nodded, and I looked too. There was a man sitting hunched on a low brick wall. A tall skinny guy who reminded me of Ichabod Crane from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Toby.

It’s hard to say exactly when we stopped being best friends, when we stopped even resembling two girls who were sisters. Greta went to high school and I was still in middle school. Greta had new friends and I started having Finn. Greta got prettier and I got … weirder. I don’t know. None of those things should have mattered, but I guess they did. I guess they were like water. Soft and harmless until enough time went by. Then all of a sudden you found yourself with the Grand Canyon on your hands.

26th February, 1987

Toby's letter.

“Well, Finn thought you were good. Really good.” Toby uncrossed his legs and leaned in. “Finn said art isn’t about drawing or painting a perfect bowl of fruit. It’s about ideas. And you, he said, have enough good ideas to last a lifetime.”

“Remember the blue place? That little blue room,” Greta mumbled.

My back ached and I wanted so badly to put Greta down again. She was awake. She could stand. I could set her down on the curb and we could talk about invisible mermaids. But I knew if I did that, the moment would be over. As soon as she saw my face, she’d remember to be mean. She’d remember who she was.

“What about it?” I said. “I don’t know, just sometimes … sometimes I think about things like that. What it used to be like.” I almost told her that it could be like that again. That if she stopped being so mean we could go back to being like we used to be. But I didn’t say it. I wasn’t sure it was true.

I put everything in the back of my closet with the teapot and the first note from Toby, and then I fell asleep. The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.

“Greta?” “What.” “Have you ever had a kind of situation where you’re not sure if you want to do something and, even if you decide you do want to do it, you’re not sure how to do it anyway?”

I was glad I hadn’t brought the book in. It was normal things Greta wanted me to confess to. Boyfriends and sex and crushes. Things we might have in common. All I had was a strange man in the city, and secret trips to Playland, and pleas for help from the dead.

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother’s head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through.

My mother looked back and forth between Greta and me. She breathed out a long slow sigh. I wanted so much to say something my mother wanted to hear, because then maybe, just maybe, she would somehow turn back into the mother who would never force someone to choose between his boyfriend and his sister.

I nodded, and maybe I stared a little too long. Maybe I needed to get a good look at this version of my mother.

I walked right in, like Toby was a huge wardrobe that could take me anywhere I wanted to go.

We parked in the Bronx River parking lot, which meant that we came in through the North America section. North America was the most convincing. The big trees and grassy fields with deer and bison and wolves looked good. Like some kind of super condensed version of all the American wildlife there’d ever been. Like every kind of thing we’d killed off had been ushered back into the world.

The train moved out. Right away we were crossing the muddy Bronx River, and a woman’s voice came over the speakers saying we were in India, crossing the Ganges. I looked over at Toby and saw he was grinning, and I gave him a nod. “Don’t look out too far,” I said. “It wrecks it.” Greta always looked out too far. She was always the one who would point out the places where you could see the real Bronx through a gap in the trees.

Good going, Greta! Keep raining on everyone's parade.