History of Wolves(21)

“What is it?” Patra asked, at first amused. Then exasperated. She crouched down and kissed at his chin. “Kiddo, what is it? What did I do?” but he wouldn’t open his eyes. She looked over at me, sitting with my knees to my chest, and though it would have been simple to say what she’d done wrong, I kept quiet. I wasn’t sure how to explain Europa’s capital to her without it sounding condescending, without speaking as if Paul weren’t there. I shrugged. “Okay,” Patra said. “Paul the kid is taking a time out. This kiddo here is having a rest, because he’s so excited that his dad’s coming tomorrow. Right?”

It was clearly Patra who was so excited. That afternoon, she’d biked into town to pick up extra groceries and cut her hair instead of working on the manuscript. She’d made an appointment with Nellie Banks—who’d gone to beauty school—and it was strange now to see Patra’s hair feathered and short, curled up under her ears. It moved with a different gravity than it did before, Europa’s gravity perhaps, shifting complexly in the late afternoon light.

Slowly, deliberately, I put on Paul’s leather glove and had it walk on two fingers over to him, sniff his knee like a tiny animal.

“Hee,” he said, sitting up.

When he did, I saw that his face was pouring with sweat. It gathered in a big drip at his chin. His pupils had taken over his eyes, flying saucers coming in. He swayed.

“Okay, then,” Patra said. As if Paul had made some argument to which she’d given in. She scooped him up in her arms, and her voice scrabbled up an octave—”Feefifofum”—then it came back down slowly on stairs. “I. Smell. The blood—” She chewed his neck, and when he half smiled, she said, “Hey, little man. Hey, kiddo. What does CS tell us?”

“I smell the blood.”

“There is no spot where God is—”

“You’re the Englishman,” he told her.

Patra nudged open the sliding door with one knee and went inside, Paul in her arms like an excess of infant—all dangling limbs—and the white cat darted out just as the door closed. Patra didn’t notice. The cat made a break for the far side of the deck, then stopped abruptly, as if coming to an unseen boundary. The end of Europa. The start of the woods.

“What?” I asked it. “May as well try the world.”

The cat turned around to look at me. Ears back, whiskers trolling the air.

I menaced it. “What do you think I’m gonna do?”

It was already evening, already six o’clock. But as I listened to a running faucet, snatches of a song through the screen, the whole day seemed to bare its open jaws at me. There was nothing to do now that Paul and Patra had gone inside. The sun overhead was still high enough in the sky to feel fixed forever. The white cat made a wide slow circle around me on the deck, then sat stiffly at the sliding glass door, waiting to be let back in. Meowing plaintively, going like a clock alarm, without pause. I should have just gone home. I should have clomped down the steps and found the trail, headed for the ridge of red pine, followed by the stand of old birch. Loon nest, beaver dam, sumac trail, dogs. I should have gone home to the dogs, who would have slobbered all over my face and hands with happiness.

Instead I stood up, snuck around the side of the house, climbed up the spoke-like branches of a spruce near Paul’s window. Patra lay on the bed with Paul reading a book. I could see their bodies spooned together, Patra’s arm wrapped around him, her face pressed into the sweaty hair at the back of his head. He held a sippy cup, half-tipped, in his hands. As Patra read to him, she kept kissing his one exposed ear, that raw little flower rising up from the bedclothes. There, there. Her tenderness was breathtaking. I could feel it—even from outside the room, even in my treetop perch—making everything disappear. There goes the world. There goes the house. Poof. There goes your bed and your body, too. There go thoughts. His eyes fluttered a few times, closed. The wind gave up rustling the trees. The sky clouded over. When Paul’s mouth opened up and he was asleep, Patra carefully stood, extracted the cup from his hands, and left the room.

She came back and undressed him as he slept. I watched her uncoil his legs from his pants and put him in a diaper.

His soft belly puckered beneath the plastic waistband. I’d never seen him in a diaper before. I don’t know why that got to me, but up came a curl of saliva in my throat—something I didn’t expect, a liquid claw—and as it did, the black cat pounced to the inner windowsill. Nonchalantly, not even looking out at me, licking one paw. Still. I was startled, so I left.


I thought that would be it till Tuesday because of Memorial Day weekend. But the next morning, I was sitting on the roof of the shed, reading a People magazine I’d stolen from the school secretary’s trash, when I saw Patra’s blue Honda coming up my parents’ road. The whole woods droned with motors—weekenders on the lake testing their speedboats—so I didn’t hear the car until it was halfway up the sumac trail. Popping gravel and snagging trees.

I came down from the roof in a single leap, just as the dogs started getting nervous, hauling their chains from the dirt and peering down the road. Shhh, I told them. I trotted a little way through the dense corridor of sumac and then stopped Patra’s car by patting it softly on the hood.

“Linda! Careful!” She rolled down her window and leaned out.