History of Wolves(36)

“Five fifteen,” I revised, when I saw her glancing anxiously at the clouds out the window.

“Let me get his jacket on, though,” she nodded. “Let me zip him up in case it rains. Let me get his hat.”

Behind the hotel parking lot, I found a rickety wooden staircase that led down the steep, barren bank to the water. As Paul and I descended, step by step, I could see brown waves dragging stones in and out of the rocky cove. Gulls hung overhead. At the shore, lake water misted our knuckles each time a big wave broke. I tried teaching Paul to skip stones, but he just lobbed them in so they sank. “Like this,” I said, curving my wrist and sending one out. Watching it bounce on the water four times. Five. Six. Farther out, away from shore, Lake Superior was a deep blue, almost black near the horizon. The Wisconsin side of the lake was hard to see. My dad was right. Night was arriving early because a thunderhead was advancing to the south. There was the trawl of stones and then a hiss, as a wave withdrew between the tiny pebbles on the shore and another one came in. Paul had his hands in his jacket sleeves, and even so he was trembling. His face was drawn and gray, the color of carp. It occurred to me then, as the waves picked up, that I hadn’t really looked at him since morning. He’d been sleeping in the car. And when he was awake, he’d been turned into something of a pet by Leo, who’d carried him around, who’d talked over his head, who’d given him Lego bricks to play with.

I bent down and looked at him. “Everything okay?”

“Everything okay,” he repeated.

“We should go in?”

“We should go in,” he said. His breath against my face smelled fruity, sweet.


*


Inside again, Patra fed us dinner. She’d ordered room service for two, grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milkshakes with bent red straws. Each of our rooms had a pair of queen-size beds, so there was a football field of bedclothes between us, a dozen blood-red pillows, bowls of peppermints in plastic twists on the nightstand. I sucked my shake in bed and watched the Weather Channel on the big-screen TV, the storm front a pixelating haze passing to the south. It would just miss us I saw, with the tiniest jab of dismay. Patra lay in the bed opposite, Paul snuggled in her arms. Eventually, Leo came in from the other room and tapped his bare wrist with a crooked finger. They had a reservation at the hotel restaurant downstairs, so when Patra glanced over at me—beached on my private shore of blankets and pillows, across the room—I whispered, “Go.” Thank you, she mouthed. She kissed Paul, tugged at her drooping socks, and left the room.

A moment later, Leo poked his head back in and said, “We’ll be right downstairs if you need something.”

As if I didn’t already know that.

I crawled off the bed and crossed the room to where Paul was dozing. Brushed crumbs from his covers, clicked off the lamp. Then I went into the bathroom and scratched open one of the tiny bars of soap with my fingernails. I didn’t know how much time I’d have before they returned, so I didn’t risk taking a bath—though I was tempted. Instead I stood under scalding water in the shower for one magnificent minute, letting needles of water pluck open some feeling of woe, some feeling of desolation I hadn’t known I’d felt. A capsized feeling, a sense of the next thing already coming. I toweled off, wriggled into the cool thrift-store slip. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror for the steam. I couldn’t make out whether I looked more like a little kid trying too hard or a teenage girl with secret worries, like boys and college. Back in the bedroom, Paul was sleeping with his mouth open. I arranged my limbs on my own bed so they were splayed out, exposed. After a moment, I changed my mind and put my legs in a coil, and I waited for Patra to find me like that. Curled up in my nightie, facing the wall. Unconcerned about anything.

I didn’t sleep of course. I listened to the unfamiliar sound of traffic on the road, and real waves, Superior surf crashing into real Superior boulders. I could hear the squeals of girls at the bar across the parking lot, and the elevator humming up and down through the walls. When Leo and Patra returned at last, they left the lights off, so I never knew for sure if they looked in on us. The cool slip barely covered my thighs, and I was shivering by the time I heard a thump in the other room, followed by a stiff muffled cry. My newly shaved leg scratched with goose pimples. It felt like someone else’s prickly leg in bed with me when I brushed against it with my hand. “Ah!” someone said through the walls.


That’s when I slid from the bed and crept through the bathroom in my bare feet. I nudged open the far door, waited, then looked in through the crack.


It was dark, but the window blinds were open. A streetlight was shining in. At first I saw Leo all alone on the bed, sitting up at one end and looking out the window—as if waiting for some signal, some comet or celestial appearance in the darkness of the heavens over the city. Then I saw Patra on her knees on the floor in front of him, Leo’s hand on her head, and so I thought of Lily and Mr. Grierson. They morphed there in the dark as I watched them. They were Lily and Patra, and Leo and Mr. Grierson at once. They were husband and wife, they were student and teacher—they were frightened bully and beautiful Lily. They were both. She looked so small on her knees on the floor, hunched over his lap. She gasped when she raised her head. “Come on, please,” she panted, so I might have gone in, I might have interrupted them, if I hadn’t seen him push her head away, gently, the way you push an overly affectionate dog. If I hadn’t heard her say to him, just as gently, “Stop being a baby, Leo.” She was playfully mean: “Relax. I know you like that.”