History of Wolves(39)

“They’re mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Do you know when that was?”

“Before rockets,” Paul guessed, blinking his gummy lashes.

“Before cars,” Leo said. “And how many sails did you see on each ship?”

“They went by pretty fast,” I intervened.

“A hundred,” Paul breathed.

“Fourteen,” Leo said, a tyrant for facts. “Or eleven or eight, depending on type.” Then he settled into an explanation about wind currents, topmasts and topsails, traditional rigging and nautical miles. He wasn’t preaching, exactly, just giving numbers, just enumerating statistics and particulars. Still, there was something pontifical about the way he talked, something lulling and insistent at once, and as he spoke, I rolled a single strawberry seed over my teeth, hard as a grain of sand, gritty as that, and as unswallowable. After a while, I stopped listening to Leo, who was advancing a method for converting fathoms to meters. I set the seed between two molars and took a sip of lemonade, waiting, as I did, for Patra to notice I was wearing her headband. I’d swiped it from the bathroom counter that morning on the way out. It was hard blue plastic with rows of tiny inner spikes. It felt like having someone’s teeth against my temples—uncomfortable, vaguely threatening—but reassuring, too, like when a dog closes his jaws affectionately on your wrist and does not bite down, but could. My head felt different: I waited for Patra to notice my new head.

But Patra had her eye on Leo, who, after finishing his speech about sails, had his eye on a tugboat coming into the harbor. The tugboat captain was waving from the deck at Paul, who—I noticed then, in a disconcerting flash—had his eyes on me. He was saying something garbled about Europa, where there was a sandbox with diggers, where nobody lived, where ships sailed around empty, and lawn mowers mowed.

“In the Goldilocks zone,” he said.

Leo laughed, glancing at Patra in surprise. “He’s doing Europa and Illinois, combined.”

“He misses home,” Patra explained, happily almost, as if she’d discovered the key to something. “He just misses Oak Park, right?” She looked to Leo for confirmation.

“Um, excuse me,” said the woman on the blanket beside us.

She stood up. She had a stack of paper napkins in her hand, which lifted up one by one like birds and fluttered to the ground. It seemed oddly coordinated, like a magic show for children, in which the trick was a simple application of gravity. I wondered if she was performing for Paul, who often got little performances like this from strangers. I smiled obediently at the woman, which was the wrong thing to do. She frowned and dropped the remaining napkins on the grass in front of Patra and me. “Excuse me?” she scolded, barely concealing her disgust, and I saw then that Paul was throwing up in a bubbly white mass on the grass.

Leo set his hand on Paul’s spine, patted down very gently.

The woman shook her head at us. “Looks like he’s come down with something real bad.”

“Thank you!” Leo said politely.


The sun kept shining and the wind kept blowing as we packed up the silver thermos and the Tupperware, the plastic cups we’d shaken out in the grass, the black cloth napkins. Patra and I put everything back in its compartment, in its loop of elastic, and shut up all the wicker doors. Patra’s hands were white, but she wanted to put everything away precisely and in order, so we did. Leo carried a listless Paul to the car. As we followed across the grass, children ran in circles around us, chucking food at the seagulls. The children were hatted, shiny with sunscreen, laughing uproariously at the predatory gulls. They craned their heads back, lost their hats in the wind. More and more of them gathered in the spot we’d left open on the grass, and above them, the flock of gulls continued to grow. The birds were ravenous, undiscriminating. When I turned around for one last look, I saw the kids were experimenting. They were tossing into the air popcorn pieces and wax cups, carrot sticks, packets of gum, coins from their parents’ pockets, handfuls of rock.


That was June twentieth, so summer was spinning around us in full force. The city was crowded with traffic and day-trippers, white toy dogs on leashes, flower and popcorn vendors, kids on skateboards, old people with canes and walkers, corner ice-cream carts. It was a snow-globe kind of summer day—seagulls everywhere floating down, the sky a dome of unbroken blue. One day later, on June twenty-first, Paul died of cerebral edema. This, I later learned, is similar to what climbers die of at high altitudes, and what deep-sea divers sometimes succumb to after they ascend. The brain swells and presses outward against the skull, and the optic nerves are under so much pressure they smash into the back of the eye. The brain literally gets too big for the head, crowds the plates in the skull, rearranges the gray matter. In his bed at sea level, wedged between his rows of stuffed animals and stacks of books, Paul probably had a terrible headache. He probably had a funny sweet taste in the back of his throat. He had diabetic ketoacidosis, I was later told.

Later I was told many things. That Paul had likely been nauseated and incontinent for weeks before this, that as his brain had started to swell in the last twenty-four hours, he went partially blind, lost consciousness, slipped into a coma. That, while this last part was happening, he was left uncared for in his bed at the summer house—that instead of taking him to the hospital, instead of giving him the insulin and liquids he needed to survive, Leo had made pancakes and read him books, and Patra had tidied the house and emptied the litter box, and I had moved pieces around a Candy Land board. His parents had taken him for a long drive in the car, while his babysitter had hauled into his room stones and leaves and pinecones. I’d brought in yard waste, they said, incredulous.