History of Wolves(47)

“No, no,” I said.

But as I gathered my jacket from the floor, as I stuffed the burrito papers back in the soggy bag, I found myself adding, “My mom doesn’t even know where I am. I split after my dad died without telling her anything.”

“She’s guilty,” he said.

“My mom?” I turned around.

“No, the traveler. That girl there with her rucksack.”

“Piss off,” I said. “You don’t know me.”

He shrugged. “Go on, Fool.”


The night I got back from the Tall Ships Festival in Duluth, I lay in my loft for a long time, the light from the lamp below drawing moths, flies, mosquitoes. They crawled in through cracks in the screens, through minute gaps in the door and window frames. My mother sat at the table below waiting for me to come and talk to her. I could hear her weight shifting, the pine floorboards groaning beneath her. I could sense that she wanted me to climb down the ladder, to let gravity take me by the ankles, to sit with her and tell her about Duluth. She wanted me to want to tell her about Patra and her family—at last—so she could deride them and their middle-class values, but at the same time be proud of me for getting along so well, for knowing how the world worked, for not fighting it like she had, and did. I could sense her waiting for this. And if I did that, if I told her about the Denny’s soup and the maroon-and-white hotel, she’d make the Gardners seem trivial and bland, utterly ordinary. “Don’t give me that look,” she’d say. “What’s that thing in your hair?” she’d ask. She’d notice the headband right away, and laugh at it, and call me a Teenager.

Which I was. What else could I be?

So I acted like one. There was a window in the loft, a small square of glass, which I sometimes propped open in the summer with a wedge of pine. After a long period of failing to sleep, I pushed that window open, shimmied out—I was wiry as anything back then—and pulled myself onto a slowly swaying pine near the back of the cabin. Then I swung myself around and leapt a few feet down onto the roof of the shed. My dad would hear that and think it was a branch falling, or a raccoon. He never took account of sounds like me: ninety-pound things blew down in the course of a regular night in the woods. It was nothing. I was nothing. I kept my gaze from traveling across the lake to the Gardners’ place, whose lights would ruin my night vision. I let night do its work on my eyes. Gradually, objects transfigured in the darkness. Real tree branches emerged from the shadows of tree branches, and though clouds had come in, I found my way easily off the shed. At first I simply wanted to put distance between myself and the cabin, moving toward the lake out of habit. But once I got there, my dad’s banged-up Wenonah was waiting for me to climb in.

For the thousandth time, I appreciated the waveless passage that was a canoe ride anywhere. I barely lifted the paddle. The boat moved all on its own.


“You wanna know what Jung would say?” Rom asked me. I stood in his doorway with my burrito bag. “The archetypal Fool is Pet-ah Pan.” He used a British accent to say it. He scrunched his nose.

“Blah, blah, blah,” I said.

“It’s true. Girl Scout youth in gold-tipped shoes, with a pet and a lunch packed.”

I zipped up my jacket, cradled my trash. I felt attacked, and at the same time sorry for him. “You said you’d do my past, not the fucking future.”

“Same thing, in this case.”





13


THAT THE HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE WAS DARKER THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE, the night sky brighter, that true night had yet to show itself—I noticed these things only gradually. I dug my paddle deep into the leaf-flecked water. It was only June, but fall it seemed had already come to ruin a few aspens. I was still dressed for a day in Duluth. I hadn’t taken off my tennis shoes in the loft, or my good jeans, which were starting to feel tight in the crotch as I shoved in with the paddle. Patra’s headband pulsed around my head, plaintively.

Please, please, please, it went, as I paddled along.

I didn’t mean to go anywhere; I simply meant to leave. I let the wind and the lake take me where they would. After a few cool minutes, I set the wooden handle across my knees and let myself glide. My temples were pounding. The ache in my head had moved by then into my jaw and skull, making me queasy, making me realize that we hadn’t stopped for dinner on the way home from Duluth. Breakfast and lunch combined had been a few knotty strawberries. When this occurred to me, when I realized I hadn’t really eaten all day, I began to feel truly sick. The sensation came over me in a pounce. I could tell the feeling had been hovering over me for hours, just waiting till I was out in the open, out on the lake, before bearing down. I was dizzy, lightheaded. By the time the canoe ran ashore, the whole world was swaying when I looked around. Still Lake, no longer still at all.

I climbed from the canoe carefully, gripping the sides with both hands. And though I hadn’t planned on it, I wasn’t surprised now to be clamoring over the wet rocks below the Gardners’ deck. I hardly had a thought in my head. I was just hungry and tired and fully dressed, unwilling to look back at the cabin where my mother sat, her hands sticky with pear.

I snuck around to the front door.

No, I wasn’t, I told the police later, thinking of Paul. I was thinking about finding myself something to eat. I figured I could go right in the front door—I knew it was never locked—and scrounge around for some of Paul’s pretzels in the cabinet. I knew I could do this without waking anyone up, chew without making a sound, leave without anyone noticing what had been taken. But once I had that thought—pretzels, maybe a granola bar—I realized I wanted more than that, that I would open the fridge and eat straight from the carton of cottage cheese, fish the last two pickles from the jar with my fingers, suck all Paul’s leftover noodles from his bowl. I would do all that, and maybe I’d also go into the dark bathroom and pee (silently, trickling it out), slip their half-used bar of lavender soap into my pocket, take Patra’s cell phone from the counter, push Leo’s manuscript under my shirt. I felt almost giddy at the thought. Hadn’t I planned this out long ago? It suddenly seemed I had. But of course it wasn’t a true plan at all, only the pulsing in my head, that old yearning to take far more than was reasonable.