Tell The Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

My shoulders slumped, and I thought I might cry in front of Greta for the first time in years. There were all my secrets, spread out on the table. Like someone had taken my insides and scooped them out for everyone to see. Look, here are her stupid hopes! Look, here’s her dumb soft heart! But then I watched Greta pick up the teapot and pour tea into her mug. It poured out smooth and neat, and not a single drop spilled. She set the teapot back down on the table, running a finger around the lid before picking up her mug. Her

After a while Greta’s whole body seemed to sink a little, like all of it, this whole mean plan, had somehow backfired.

Each one teetering on only two legs, paws flailing out, clutching at the air. I stared at them and suddenly I could see that they weren’t really dancing at all, just stumbling around. Like great clumsy creatures about to lose their balance.

“June, look, I can’t. I really, really can’t. You weren’t there. You don’t know …” It wasn’t the first time he’d said something like that, and the words hung there. You weren’t there. You don’t know. I didn’t say anything at first. I let those words worm their way through my head. I let them slither right down into my heart. I nodded slowly, then flipped the notebook closed with one finger. I stood up and pretended to look at my watch. “Oh, June. Don’t go. I … You don’t know what it was like. You don’t—”

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn’t be a mother and it was likely you wouldn’t become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You’d become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you’d have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed. “Why do I do it?” my dad said. “That’s a no-brainer. For you. For you and Greta and your mother.”

But what if you ended up in the wrong kind of love? What if you accidentally ended up in the falling kind with someone it would be so gross to fall in love with that you could never tell anyone in the world about it? The kind you’d have to crush down so deep inside yourself that it almost turned your heart into a black hole? The kind you squashed deeper and deeper down, but no matter how far you pushed it, no matter how much you hoped it would suffocate, it never did? Instead, it seemed to inflate, to grow gigantic as time went by, filling every little spare space you had until it was you. You were it. Until everything you ever saw or thought led you back to one person. The person you weren’t supposed to love that way. What if that person was your uncle, and every day you carried that gross thing around with you, thinking that at least nobody knew and, as long as nobody knew, everything would be okay?

Toby moved his big hands over his arms like he was holding the pieces of himself together.

“I just thought, maybe we’re supposed to try to, you know, move on,” I said. Toby glanced up. I thought he’d looked older when I saw him earlier, but now, without the coat, he seemed younger. Shrunk down to nothing. He cocked his head and stared at me with a puzzled expression. “But where would we move to?”

There was no “us.” Toby was doing what Finn asked him to do. No more. No less.

glanced around, trying to see if there really were any famous actors there. I noticed one man who I thought looked like Danny DeVito, but then I realized that it was just Kelly Hanrahan’s dad.

Greta thought she could do whatever she wanted, get drunk as anything, and I’d be there to carry her home. She thought after everything she’d done, ruining all my Finn stuff, making me look stupid again and again, that she could rely on me. Well, she couldn’t. This time she’d find that out. I wouldn’t be there to rescue her, and that was that. As we were leaving, I saw Ben in the front lobby, dressed in his all-black backstage clothes and buying a cup of Hawaiian Punch at the PTA snack table. “Hey,” I said as I passed. “Oh,

Heavy, drenching. How the ground around Greta might dissolve into mud. How the river might rise and flood if the rain was hard and fast enough. I imagined Greta floating away. And the wolves. What if the wolves were there? What if they were real? And what if they were hungry? I thought of that look on her face when we were talking about invisible mermaids. Like a little kid. Even if the wolves were only coyotes, they could take Greta and tear her to pieces.

“Finn always asked—of course he would. But I knew you hoped I’d say no. Don’t even lie. I know you hoped that. It was like a trap. If I came along, you’d resent me. And if I didn’t, well, then I wouldn’t be a part of any of it.” It was true. Of course she would have seen that.

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?

knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they’d be.

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.

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.

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

“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.

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.

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.

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 th...

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.

It’s like we’ve known each other all these years. Without even seeing each other. It’s like there’s been this … this ghost relationship between us. You laying out my plectrums on the floor, me buying black-and-white cookies every time I knew you would be coming over. You didn’t know that was me, but it was.”

“He was both our first loves, June.” The words hung there and I felt my cheeks getting hot. I turned away so Toby couldn’t see my face.

Suddenly I couldn’t understand why I’d been carrying it around with me for so, so long.

We stayed like that for a while. Me perched on the edge of Toby’s bed, slowly rubbing his thin arm, him squeezing my hand. Like the oldest of couples. That’s what it felt like. Like we were two people who’d known each other forever. People who could tell each other anything or just sit there saying nothing at all.

“Finn never knew. It’s just between you and me now, all right? It doesn’t matter. It’s nobody’s fault.” I felt his fingers squeeze my palm, and it was like he was pressing this secret into my hand.

And that’s when I finally gave away one of my Finn stories to Toby. It was just a small story, like all my stories were. I told him about that day Greta brought the mistletoe with her to Finn’s apartment. I whispered the story into his ear. I told him about the weather that day. The pellets of sleet as we drove down. The way Finn looked. What he was wearing. I wasn’t even sure Toby could hear me, but I told him about the Requiem on the stereo. How the portrait was almost done. How scared I was. How stupid. And how, in the end, none of that mattered, because Finn saw through it all. I told Toby about Finn’s soft butterfly kiss on the top of my head. How he saw exactly what I was feeling and made it all right. Like he always did.

I would have ridden around like that for hours and hours. Maybe weeks, months. Maybe the rest of my life.

There was Toby’s drowsy head on my shoulder and my open hand on his head, and the rough wool blanket that covered both of us, and the feeling of having laughed and laughed and cried until there was nothing left at all. But stillness. The best kind of stillness. That’s how I remember that night. That’s how I want always to remember it.

Finn was my first love. But Toby, he was my second. And the sadness in that stretched like a thin cold river down the length of my whole life. My

Mostly we sat silent, but every once in a while Greta would sing snatches of whatever she could think of, and every time she did we saw a little smile pull at the corner of Toby’s mouth.

But even without light, the day was starting. Car doors slammed. The grind of tires on gravel driveways. My parents’ radio alarm clock, the serious voice of 1010 WINS. All news. All the time. The bathroom door closing, then opening again, and then slippered footsteps padding down the stairs.

That all the jealousy and envy and shame we carried was our own kind of sickness. As much a disease as Toby and Finn’s AIDS.

In the end it was just the two of us in the room. My mother and me. Toby’s body stilled, and she reached out and laid her hand on my shoulder. That was how one person’s story ended.

Sometimes I tell myself that it wasn’t so bad. Being responsible for killing someone who was dying anyway. Murdering a person who was already almost dead. That’s what I try to think sometimes, but it never works. Two months is sixty days, 1,440 hours, 86,400 minutes. I was a stealer of minutes. I stole them from Toby and I stole them from myself. That’s what it came down to.

One thing I do know is that my superpower is gone. My heart is broken and soft, and I am plain again. I have no friends in the city. Not a single one. I used to think maybe I wanted to become a falconer, and now I’m sure of it, because I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

run there, like Toby must have done on that stormy night, then I bend down and crawl on the earth. Because what if there’s a clue? What if there’s a piece of chunky strawberry bubble gum still bundled up in its waxy wrapper, or a weather-faded matchbook, or a fallen button from somebody’s big gray coat? What if buried under all those leaves is me? Not this me, but the girl in a Gunne Sax dress with the back zipper open. The girl with the best boots in the world. What if she’s under there? What if she’s crying? Because she will be, if I find her. Her tears tell the story of what she knows. That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there’s nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home.

The Whitney guy looked at us slowly, one at a time, and I wondered if he went through his whole life that way, appraising everything he saw.

Almost. I noticed that the two things my mother had added—the necklace and the ring—were still there. That’s how good she was. She was so good that even an art expert couldn’t tell her painting apart from Finn’s. She’d be part of that portrait forever. I watched my mother as she looked at the painting, but she didn’t give anything away. I thought of trying to catch her eye, so she’d know I understood what she’d done, but I decided not to. Everyone needs to think they have secrets.

I’m the only one who knows about the wolf, and I’m the only one who knows that if the light hits the canvas just right, if it’s deep-orange end-of-the-day light and it comes through the window from the side at just the right angle, and if you know what you’re looking for, if you know exactly the right place to look, you can still see the five black buttons. Not the way they were, not clumsy and thick, but more like shadows. Like small eclipsed moons, floating over my heart.