History of Wolves(19)

“That’s an education.” I felt like my dad. That’s what he said when I’d carried the canoe on a three-mile portage through the mud. I felt like my dad, and at the same time like the kid who’d carried that canoe, who was desperate and aching and crying from exhaustion.

“Be quiet!” Paul yelled.

“You want me to be quiet?” I asked him. I could still feel the long scrape his fingernail had made across my cheek, the wet shape he’d printed on my flannel. “You want me to be quiet?”

His face was marbled white and red. “I’m a perfect child of God,” he said.

“What did you say to me?” I grabbed at Paul’s arm. There was something in the singsong lilt of his sentence—like when he’d spoken to that girl on her back in the playground—that made the back of my neck prickle unexpectedly. “Who are you?” I found myself hissing at him.

I must have truly scared him I guess, because when I let go, Paul pushed his hands in under his butt, sucked in his cheeks, and hunched up his shoulders. He was so naked his skin looked like clothes to me. He seemed sealed up in a very tight pink suit, without a wrinkle or a seam to be found. Wet and unfathomably opaque. Smelling of baby shampoo. Of urine.

I heard Patra whoop with laughter all the way out on the deck—then add something and start laughing again. I walked over and closed the bedroom door.

“You cut your face,” Paul noticed.

“You wet the bed.” I’d noticed, too.

He started crying then, crying as I’d never seen anyone cry before. His face was clenched and he made no sound, but for high-pitched suck of air every time he took another breath.

“Calm down,” I told him. “Let’s get you dressed.”

“I want my mom,” he whimpered.

“Not yet,” I said.

“My mom,” he begged.

“You don’t want her to see this.” I pointed at the dark stain on his sheets.

He set his wet eye sockets over his knees and wouldn’t look up.

“Come on,” I said. “Come on, okay? Let’s put you in your pajamas.”

He dragged his face away from his knees. “The choo-choo ones?”

“The train ones, yes.”

He lay back as I worked his feet into the footed fleece.

Bit by bit, I got him dressed. Then I stripped the sheets, threw the comforter over the bare mattress, hid the wet sheets in the closet for the time being, and turned on his night-light, which was a caboose shining a warm red light. Together, we lined up his stuffed animals again the way he liked, in two rows against the wall. We opened Goodnight Moon. All the while, Paul was winding his wet hair with one finger into a worried horn on his forehead. All the while, I was thinking about where my hunting jacket was, which hook it was on, so I could put it on and get out fast. Both of us guilty and ashamed. Both of us wanting comfort of a kind we could not give the other. I was trying to figure out what to tell Patra, who would come in any minute with what would be, I feared, a confused, disappointed look on her face. I could say Paul had been a tyrant, and he had been: he’d scraped an arc on my face that stung still. But of course I was eleven years older and had everything on him—age, weight, education (as my father would say)—and all he wanted was a half hour with his mother before bed. And all he had in the world was the ability to throw a tantrum.

We sat stiffly apart on the rumply made bed. Paul pretended to be absorbed, and I pretended to be amused, by the little mouse in the great green room. I turned one page, then Paul turned the next. We waited for Patra.

But she was distracted when she came in. She opened the door, and I saw that her face was flushed, her lips wet. She bent down and kissed Paul on the mouth, shoveling his damp hair back with her hand. Then she kissed me as well, a feathery little peck on the scalp. I felt my heart do something to the skin at my throat, which I hoped she didn’t see.

“Guess what?” she gushed.

We said nothing.

“Your dad’s coming up for the long weekend.”

I looked at her. She scooped up her hair in two hands and held it above her head for a moment before letting it go. I could hear it come down in the dark, a little whoosh of hair against her neck.

Then she leapt into bed with us.


There were eleven years between us all. We were four, fifteen, twenty-six. I’m not particularly superstitious. I never went in big for horoscopes or anything like that, but at the time that number became significant to me. I started to see it everywhere. When we had our spring pep rally there were eleven red EXIT signs spaced evenly between bleachers. I noticed that in blackjack the ace could be counted as a one or an eleven, depending on which was better for your hand. My father reminded me of this rule when we were playing cards one night, generator off, the lantern making huge shadows of our cards on the table. That night I won from him one of his precious hand-rolled cigars, which I promised not to smoke until I was eighteen. Or try this. After Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus, the remaining apostles were called the Eleven, the chosen. My mother, repeating some sermon, reminded me of that.

I felt almost spooked when I remembered that the husband—the astronomer who was always gone—was thirty-seven. Though I never got very far past algebra in school, it seemed that such a fixed pattern should have some meaning beyond mere coincidence. It should, shouldn’t it? At the time, I thought about this a lot. I tried rearranging the variables, keeping the constant constant. I wondered what Patra was like at fifteen. I imagined her in high school: shorter than me, even skinnier, better liked. She’d be the kind of girl who had one close friend, someone who moved away when she was twelve and left her disconsolate at first, then sweetly, tragically distant. She’d have really excellent pens and extremely legible handwriting. I imagined myself at the husband’s age, thirty-seven (I’m thirty-seven now: I have a car payment, a PO box), and I made the husband into a child. A belligerent four-year-old with Velcro shoes, a milk moustache, and a temper. I sent Paul into his twenties by himself. I gave him a college degree, maybe a master’s, and I set him loose in the world with his golden hair, with a degree in architecture and maybe an admirable ear for music or foreign languages. I gave Paul time to be a lady-killer for real, to regret his Chinese tattoo, to begin to regret lots of things. You know. To be twenty-six.