History of Wolves(48)

Fee-fi-fo-fum, I thought as I spun the cool doorknob, went in.

The main room was hard to make out in the dark. I saw the big triangular windows first, and through them the narrow strip of light I’d traveled from my parents’ lit house. Out of habit, I wiggled out of my tennis shoes and set them against the wall.

I started toward the cupboard in my socks. I was thinking of snacks in crinkly packages. I was hoping for peanut butter granola bars, nestled snugly in boxes. The hinge on the cupboard made a throaty sound, and I no sooner had the box in my hands, the cupboard closed, when a tingling went up the back of my neck.

“Linda?”

I turned.

Patra sat in a shadow on the couch. She stood up slowly, a black silhouette against the window, and I had the fleeting, absurd belief that if I didn’t say anything, if I froze in my tracks, she wouldn’t see me.

“Is that you?”

I stayed quiet and didn’t move.

“Oh, dear,” she said. She was wearing just a T-shirt, and her bare legs looked pale as birch branches in the dark. She didn’t bother tugging the hem over her thighs as she came across the room.

“What is it? Wait—Leo forgot to pay you, didn’t he? Or did you forget your bag in the car? Good grief, Linda. I saw you coming across the lake, I watched you and I thought—I had this thought—she’s come to rescue us, that girl in her boat. Isn’t it weird the things you think in the dark? Isn’t it funny how the mind goes flap-flap-flap, so you don’t know if you’re sleeping or not, and you think: That girl, that crazy girl in her canoe has come to row us all away somewhere.”

“Paddle,” I whispered.

“What?” she asked.

“You row a boat. Paddle a canoe.”

“Whatever, yes.” She put a hand on her head, so her T-shirt pulled up over her panties. “I’m talking nonsense. I must have dozed off before I looked out the window and saw you. Did Leo forget to write a check? Or did you come for something else?”

Why did I come? My stomach rumbled audibly, and as it did, I took in the room more fully. I saw the closed picnic basket on the counter, the cell phone in Patra’s hand, and the way she stroked it compulsively while she watched my face, while she waited for an explanation. I looked over and saw that Paul’s door was shut. A crack of light shone beneath it, and as Patra’s head turned, as she followed my gaze, I became aware of Leo’s voice behind it talking quietly.

Patra reached for the light switch, and an odd panic washed over me. “Wait—”

“We’re all up, I guess. May as well admit it.”

“But—” Some part of me still wanted to sneak away unseen.

“No one can sleep tonight—”

Paul’s door opened and Leo came out. Patra flicked on the light, and the two of us were left squinting in the sudden brightness. Leo stood open-eyed, surprised—no, dismayed—to see me.

“What?” he said, and for an instant, a look of real fear passed over his face. I thought of that first morning when I’d met him with the hatchet as he came into the house. Then, he’d taken me as harmless, hardly worth noticing. He’d shaken my hand, introduced himself, poured glasses of juice for the both of us. Now he was acting as though I might be dangerous to him, and maybe I was—I wanted to be—but not in the way he thought. Discreetly, I set the box of granola bars on the counter behind the picnic basket. Crossed my arms.

“Linda?” he asked.

“You forgot to pay her,” Patra said.

“Did I?” He was watching me intently. He seemed about to call me out for showing up unannounced, then appeared to think better of it. “I did. I guess I did forget.” Like me, he was still wearing his clothes from the day—his khaki shorts and tucked-in shirt—but he also wore his black slippers. They flapped loose on his feet as he moved across the room to the table and began to write a check.

A sound came from the other room, a murmur or cry.

“He’s hungry!” Leo explained, bending over the checkbook. “We’ll have pancakes I think. That’s one of those foods no one can turn down. He’s ready for breakfast.”

It couldn’t have been much past eleven o’clock. The night sky had been bright when I paddled across the lake, the clouds a curdled gray over the moon. At the latest, it was just before midnight now, but for a moment it seemed possible I’d lost track of time, that the whole night had passed without my noticing. Had I fallen asleep in the loft? Was it dawn I’d seen in the sky?

“Breakfast?” Patra looked as confused as I, as muddled.

“Yep.” He glanced up from his task. “It’s early, but not too. And where is it that says you can’t eat breakfast a little early? Who wrote that rule down?”

He ripped out the check and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, and I saw that he’d written out One Hundred and Fifty Dollars. It was more money than I’d seen at once in my life, and yet so flimsy, so much less substantial than the ten-dollar bills Patra gave me. The line for my name he left blank. “Let’s let Linda be on her way.”

Patra unexpectedly grasped my arm. “Why not stay for breakfast?”

“It’s been a long, long day for her,” Leo warned.

“We should have stopped on the way home,” Patra complained to him. “It wouldn’t have been such a long day if we’d stopped.”