History of Wolves(50)

I brought Patra her glass of milk and, while Leo went to get Paul, piled pancakes onto our plates. Leo returned only seconds later, smiling directly at Patra—smiling so wide that her lips curled up too, slightly—and said, “The little king wants his in bed!” So he turned to leave again with a plate and glass of milk.

Halfway across the room, his head swiveled around. “I got it, Patty. Eat.”

I watched her sit back down.

Without speaking, she broke off a piece of pancake with her fingers and put it in her mouth. I did the same. I was so hungry, and the pancakes were so warm and soft, still gooey with batter in the middle. You could eat them without chewing much, you could get a lot into your mouth at once, you could nearly drink those pancakes down. I kept breaking off and pushing pieces in my mouth, and just when I thought I’d never get enough, never be filled up, I looked over and saw that Patra had stopped eating. Her lips were partway open, and I could see the half-chewed pancake wedged between her teeth and gums, balanced in a frothy mix on her lower lip. She sat there with her cheeks bulged out for ten seconds, twenty, and then, at last, she deliberately closed her eyes, carefully rotated her jaw, and forced that huge pancake wad down her throat. I saw it go.

“Patra?” I said, a low rumble of fear moving through me.


What was Paul like at that point? I was asked later.


I remember wondering if Patra would choke. I wondered if a person’s windpipe could be blocked by something as harmless and soft as pancake. If that kind of crisis was possible.

“Ugh,” Patra murmured. Then she stood up and went straight to the couch. She pulled her scrawny knees up inside her T-shirt, lay her head on a cushion. “That’s enough of that,” she whispered.

What time was it then? It was either very early or very late, and, as I looked across the table at the crumbs we’d made, at the pile of pancakes left, I felt suddenly drained. I made a ball of my napkin, drank the last gulp of milk from my glass. Then I went around the room flicking off the lights Leo had turned on. I found the blanket Patra had folded minutes before, shook it open over her curled form, and sat down at the other end of the couch.

Leo’s music played on.

I didn’t say anything to Patra. We looked out the window together. My parents’ cabin across the lake was dark now, but the night sky was still bright. Perhaps, I thought, a full moon had risen—or perhaps true dawn had come at last. On the shore, my dad’s Wenonah gleamed like a beached fish.

“You saw me coming?” I asked. I wanted to hear that story again.

“Oh, Linda.”

“Have you ever been in a canoe?”

“Mmm. Once. But I’m not like you. I’m a city kid, you know?”

“I know.”

She glanced at me across the couch. “At camp. They plopped me down in a canoe, and all I could think was I’m going to fall out. And the more I thought that, the more I was afraid I’d eventually tip the thing just because I’d imagined it so clearly. Splash.”

“Everybody thinks that.”

She exhaled slowly. “I need to get better at controlling my thoughts.”

“Everyone eventually tips.”

“Do they? Leo never thinks like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like the worst thing, the very worst thing could happen.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He’s a good dad.”

“Yeah?”

“And Paul! My Paul is such a good kid.”

“He is.”

She seemed pleased to hear me say that. She lifted the blanket for me to come under, so I moved in closer and let her cover me up. “You know how Paul was born?” she asked, tucking the blanket around my legs.

No, I hadn’t thought about that. I’d only ever thought of Paul as fully formed, as a four-year-old arrival from another planet. I never thought of him as an infant, as one of those hours-old, red-and-wet mounds of flesh—as coming out of Patra.

“Let me tell you something, Linda.” And I wanted her to tell me something, I did. “After I got pregnant with Paul I was sick for so long. I had this belief I was doomed somehow, that everything that could go wrong would. I had such a bad feeling about it. Leo kept saying, you’re afraid, that’s all it is. You’re afraid. And I was. I was so worried I’d made a huge mistake.”

“You’d just finished college?”

“My friends were joining the peace corps, starting grad school.”

“It makes sense, how you felt.”

“It wasn’t just that I was afraid. It felt really real, how sick I was during pregnancy. There were all these complications. Leo kept urging me to worry less, kept reading me all his books, but it was one thing after another. Low fetal weight, premature contractions, everything you could think of. Then during labor, I actually felt my heart stop. I actually heard it go thump, thump, thump”—she patted my leg as she said this—”then nothing else. And that’s when I had this tiny thought, that I’d been wrong to be so scared of this, that God wouldn’t do that. God wouldn’t just stop my heart, would he?”

My throat closed up at the idea. “He wouldn’t.”

“Later Leo said that thought about God was Paul. That thought was him being born.”