History of Wolves(51)

Through the window, the black trees stood stiff and unyielding. Patra was quiet, her hand on my leg. She was quiet for such a long time I thought she’d drifted off, but then I felt her shift position, move closer to me so our heads almost touched on the couch cushions.

She was whispering. “I’d been resisting Leo’s way of thinking for such a long time. I kept telling him, I just don’t have your kind of mind that believes one thing without question. But then Paul was there and everything was fine. Paul was perfect, truly. And I was so happy after that, not fighting Leo anymore. Going his way seemed easy. There’s nothing to say about happiness, you know? Nobody believes you when you talk about it.” She was crying now, she was asking me: “I’m so happy, right? Don’t we seem happy to you?”

“You do,” I assured her. “You are.”


I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew I was half under the blanket and half under Patra’s legs. I could barely move beneath her soft, warm weight. I could see Patra’s head sticking out from the other side of the blanket, and I felt a deep body gladness suddenly, the same as when I used to curl up with Tameka in a sleeping bag in our shared bed. That old feeling came back to me hard, the way the sleeping bag had been like a second body we’d put on each night, the best body of all, so much more substantial than our separate ones. I nestled closer to Patra, let my hip sink into a crack in the cushions. Closed my eyes. Perhaps something did tug at the edge of my consciousness then, because I remember thinking there was nothing to be worried about—that worrying now was like worrying the canoe would tip because you’d imagined it would happen. That was impossible I told myself. It didn’t work like that.


When I awoke next, I was sweating. Leo’s CD was no longer playing, and a breeze was moving through my hair. I pushed a corner of the blanket back and let my damp neck grow chill in the cool air. What time was it? Patra, across the couch, was sleeping soundly. Somehow I stood without waking her, and it was only when I took a few steps that I realized the breeze I felt came from outside. I smelled a bit of woods blow in, the bright scent of pine needles. The sliding door to the deck was wide open, and a litter of pale leaves lay across the rug.

I stepped, shivering, across the threshold. True night had come at last. The sky: starless, dark, empty.

Someone was at the telescope, crouched.

“Paul?”

He looked up at me, and his face was bright and clear as anything. He looked stronger and healthier than I’d seen him in days, the whites of his eyes and the whites of his teeth flashing even in the dark. His hair had been worked by a finger into a sharp spoke that stood on the very top of his head. He was smiling.

“Oh, brother, another beaver,” he giggled.

“Paul—” I felt relief then. I felt relief enough to scold him. “Come on inside.”

“Let’s play survival together,” he suggested.

“Not now.”

“Look! Here comes a bear.”

He started running. He took off down the stairs and into the woods. For such a little kid, he moved far faster than I thought he could, scrambling over logs and under branches, pushing through pine boughs so they whipped back against my chest. I was running after him in my socks. Paul was in his footed pajamas. I could barely keep up, though the wet leaves and mossy rocks were all familiar to me. Then the last branch fell away and the trees opened up and the shore was in front of us. I saw, to my shock, that a silvery crust of early ice had congealed over the water. Paul looked back at me once, his hair horn bent double. He yelled, “Oh no, a bear!” The next thing I knew, he was down on his belly, elbowing his way onto that thin sheet of ice, and I realized at last how cold it was, how the smell of snow thinned the air in my nostrils, how my fingertips were already going a little numb. “Paul!” I called out, taking a small step onto the ice, listening to it splinter under my weight, feeling the whole thing give way. My third step broke through to my ankles. As I stood in the bitter cold water, as I watched Paul drag himself across the ice by the elbows, pulling himself—snake-like—toward the center of the lake, it came to me finally that this was a dream.


Then it was dawn. Two gray triangles of sky shone through the big windows. Mist was rising off the lake, and I could just make out my parents’ cabin through the haze. Bit by bit, I took in the shadowy room around me. Paul’s light was off, Leo was snoring somewhere out of sight, and Patra was beside me on the couch, still sleeping. The sliding glass door was shut tight. Everything, everything was in its rightful place. I sat up more fully—and saw Drake pacing back and forth, back and forth, in front of Paul’s closed door.

From the corner of my eye, I spotted Leo’s manuscript on the easy chair. Unwilling to go back to sleep, but also unwilling to leave the couch, I leaned over and lifted the top page from the thick stack of papers. I was expecting a document about space, something about the misguided search for extraterrestrial life based on unexamined assumptions. I thought I had a feel for the way Leo would write. I expected jargon and equations mixed with deceptively simple questions. I hoped for diagrams.

Instead, the page on top was written in bland, square language. Once I had it in my hands, I noticed it used a different font than the manuscript beneath. I read the page twice through, first focusing on the typewritten words, and then on Patra’s edits in purple pen. She’d crossed out a few phrases and scrawled a note in skinny cursive at the bottom.