History of Wolves(38)

I watched him.

“Good company, she’s always saying, and smart. But alone a lot, and I’ve seen that. I know that can’t be easy. I know how it can make a person, a young woman, clingy.”

I felt my face getting hot, but I didn’t say anything.

“Lin-da.” He spoke so kindly, now, so benignly and intensely at once. “You’ll see, I think you’ll see, that when you start with the premise we discussed—if you’re intellectually honest and as smart as Patra says—you’ll see that everything you think you know about your existence is wrong.” His brown eyes did a mild blink behind glass. “You’re not lonely, really.”

My neck tensed up. “You know, Patra told me something about you as well.”

“Is that so?” He was only somewhat interested.

“She said you’re so busy with your work—” My voice slipped on a wet spot in my throat. I steadied it back into words. “She said you’re gone so much that you hardly exist to her at all.”

He frowned. “She didn’t say that.”

“Don’t be dense.” And because that wasn’t quite enough to faze him, I sucked in a breath. “Don’t be a baby, Leo.”

That made his eyes widen slightly. That made him stand up fast, jiggle his pockets for keys, walk across the room to the closet. He wouldn’t meet my eye after that. He just mumbled, “Let’s not be late, Linda. They took the car, so we need to walk.” When I still didn’t move, he said, more insistently, “We’ll meet them at ten, okay? That’s about fifty minutes from now, tops.”

It was irritating how he was closing the door on me before I was even out of the room. It was infuriating the way he kept skipping over now for then—his insistence I be reassured by Paul and Patra’s appearance at the harbor at ten, almost an hour after I asked about them.

But there they were, on a great wrinkled blanket on the grass, and I couldn’t help it.

I was reassured.





11


THE WET GRASS IN THE HARBOR WAS TENTACLED IN SHADOWS FROM THE PASSING SHIPS. Paul and Patra sat sprawled on a blue cotton blanket with their legs open and palms back, looking up at the ships as they went past.

Leo and I were late by mere minutes, so we didn’t see the lift bridge lift. But we heard it clanging its warning across the harbor, and we saw the line of traffic backed up for blocks on Lake Avenue. By the time we wound our way through the thick crowd, by the time we made it to the knoll beneath the bridge, the first of the ships were already sliding through the narrow concrete channel. They passed overhead in silence—a tall, tidy drift. I looked up and saw dozens of white sails, all gorged with wind. The complexity of their rigging was startling, but the boats themselves moved with gorgeous simplicity, as if, having discovered some trick—having determined the secret to motion—hurtling into harbor at forty miles an hour was the greatest of all forms of stillness.

There were nine ships. The whole crowd seemed to hold its breath as they passed, the way people get when a green thunderhead looms or when a moose with a weighty rack of antlers emerges from the woods. And then, just when the last of the ships slipped beneath the raised bridge, applause broke out. Not cheers, but appreciative, almost nervous clapping. People started checking each other, self-conscious suddenly, as if unsure what to do next. Gulls floated after the boats, wings curved open, unimpressed. Some children started chucking bread over the water, which broke the spell the ships had cast.

We watched seagulls seize whole slices of white bread from the air.

“How many boats?” Leo asked. I knew by now it was a habit of his to make a lesson out of this—out of anything—to snatch up every opportunity for improvement. Paul and Patra twisted around, noticing for the first time that we were standing behind them. Patra smiled her welcome, a slick of relief in her eyes. Now that Leo was here, she was ready to play the part of sidekick parent again, to pull up blades of grass with her fingers.

“Did you see them?” she asked. Folding a blade of grass back and forth, making an accordion of it.

“Of course.” He crouched down. “Hey, Paul. Hey there, kiddo. How many did you count?”

Paul hadn’t thought to count the ships. There was a white hollow in his throat when he looked up at us.

“Nine,” I said.

I felt the need, then, to defend Paul from Leo’s good intentions. From above, from where I was standing, there seemed something funny about the way Paul was dressed. His steam engine T-shirt draped over him, bagged a little from the neck and shoulders. The toes of his blue Velcro shoes pointed inward.

Leo said, “Paul, do you know what time period those ships are from?”

I felt the need to jump in again, but then Patra opened a wicker basket on the blanket—revealing elaborate compartments for silverware and plastic cups, for cloth napkins rolled into tubes—and the feeling passed. That feeling was always passing. Patra swung open what seemed like a hidden door in the basket, and out came a silver thermos, which she tilted over cups, one for each of us. Lemonade. She peeled open a blue Tupperware, out of which gnarled strawberries bulged. “Organic,” she emphasized, passing the container to me.

I slit open a strawberry with my teeth and sat down next to Patra on the grass. “There’s room,” she said, patting the blanket, so I scooted in. Leo continued his lesson: