History of Wolves(42)

“Almost home!” Leo cried triumphantly, when the tunnel spat us out. He seemed resolved to this idea long before it was an accurate description of our circumstances. By the time we got to the old familiar highways—the ones I’d walked for years—Leo had been saying “Almost home!” for more than an hour. Then Loose River appeared in the dappled sun of the deep woods, and Leo was so elated he broke into a round of “Good King Wenceslas.” Patra joined him in an obedient soprano. My heart disobediently sank. “We’re back!” Leo announced when Patra trailed off in the middle of the second verse, so I slid my hands under my butt and imagined the car breaking down or a wretched deer in the road or any kind of calamitous barrier. I didn’t offer to get out and walk up the sumac trail. I let Leo scrape up his car driving through that dense corridor of trees in the early evening shadows.

Slowly, slowly, I retrieved my backpack from the trunk.

“‘Night!” Leo called through his open car window, turning the Honda around as soon as I slammed the trunk. I didn’t hear if Patra or Paul said anything. The backseat window was rolled up tight.


Surely, they said to me later, surely by then you sensed something was off?

Maybe. Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things. Maybe this way of seeing comes naturally to some people, and good for them if it does. But I remember it all, even now, as if two mutually exclusive things happened. First it goes the way the prosecutors described it—nausea, headache, coma, etcetera—and then it comes back to me the way it actually was with Patra and Paul—tall ships, car ride home, Good King Wenceslas, bed. Though they end the same way, these are not the same story. Maybe if I’d been someone else I’d see it differently. But isn’t that the crux of the problem? Wouldn’t we all act differently if we were someone else?


“Back early?” my mother asked when I pushed open the cabin door.

She was waiting for an answer even though I’d killed some time before coming inside, even though I’d sat against my backpack behind the shed for more than an hour with the dogs. I’d hoped to avoid this exact question.

“Madeline?” I couldn’t see her clearly, though. She was a hunchbacked shadow at the table. She had been stitching something or trying to read. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t say anything to her, just found my way across the dim room with my backpack and climbed straight up the ladder to my loft.

My mother hadn’t yet turned the lights on, of course.

So I remember thinking: Fine. Let it be night. It was probably only eight thirty or nine, nearly the longest day, but the cabin was already dark from being enveloped so completely on all sides by pines. I remember Patra’s headband pressing into my skull as I rolled onto my mattress, and relishing the wonderful ache of it. I remember the click of the lamp and my mother’s curse, before she went outside and fumbled behind the cabin for the generator. I remember that when the lights came on it was like a jolt to the skin, and that my mother stood breathing for a moment at the foot of my ladder. “Madeline?” she asked again. She jiggled one of the lower rungs, made the joints creak.

I burrowed into my sleeping bag, fully dressed.

“Have a good time in Duluth?”

‘Night, I thought.

After a few minutes, I heard the pine boards groan as she walked to the sink. I heard her swing open a cupboard, bite into one of the pears I’d bought a week ago in town. Bite, then pause. I imagined her pulling threads of wet peel through her teeth with her fingers. I could hear her breathing loudly through her nose and humming the same two lines from two totally different songs, mixing them together. Strange days have found us / Casting down their crowns along the glassy sea. My mother. That night as I lay in bed, that night after going to Duluth and back, I remember how loudly the moths buzzed around the lamp she’d turned on. I remember the feathering of their wings against the bulb, and that endless pear in her mouth, crunch-crunch-crunching. I remember her humming, pushing out more air than sound, and how all that—plus my pounding head—made it impossible to fall asleep.





HEALTH





12


“SHE’S A CORPORATE EXECUTIVE, I SWEAR TO GOD,” my mom used to say to my father. “She’s done an inventory of the pines on the hill. The pillows.”

Twelve big pines, I’d think when she said this. Two pillows and seven blankets.

I was probably six or seven when my mom started calling me a CEO. I could still climb onto my father’s lap in my cotton nightgown and pretend I was smaller, a little girl he could hold and protect—or better yet, a piece of equipment he could use, a wonderful worn tool that needed tending, like the tape measure he returned with such care to his leather belt. I curled up my legs inside my nightgown to try it out, put the tip of my thumb inside my mouth and began chewing the nail.

“Take care,” my father warned me. “There’s walls of wood nettles out by the—”

For a moment his arms were around me. He spoke into the back of my head, and it was almost, though not quite, like being petted. I could feel his breath on my scalp, his words before they were words in the rumble of his chest. Then he shifted, as if trying to scoot out from under me. He was tired. I know that now. He was tired in a way that made him seem absent, slow, hauling up some viscous thought he couldn’t quite identify without putting everything else on hold for a moment. My mother and I waited for him.