History of Wolves(66)

I could hear the gumming of her palms against the plastic of the wheel.

Then she added, getting worried, “You know it’s a load of bull, right?”


When I was eleven or twelve, I found this unexpected thing in the back of the shed. It was a wooden cradle wrapped in a clear plastic tarp, which I pulled open when I was looking for something else. The thing was hand painted with white daisies and blue lilacs, long-finned fish swimming through it all like golden grinning devils. It was filled to the brim with rotting firewood, mouse droppings, unfurling weevils. I remember covering it back up with the tarp, finding a stack of asphalt shingles to lay over it. I shooed the dogs outside and went back to my day, but later, when I was guiding the canoe through shallows or pulling some teeny thorns from Abe’s paw—or working out a tedious math problem—the image of that cradle would occasionally come back to me. I’d see the grimy rim painted fresh with lilacs and fish, the maple runners creaking back and forth, some bald little thing wedged inside, wiggling.

I’d see a face hovering over it. Going, you know, shh, shhh.

The thing is I have no memory at all of my mother before the commune broke up. In my mind it was always just Tameka and a constantly shifting amalgamate of teenagers and adults—legs in jeans, legs in skirts—and I admit I wanted to bring her into focus, see her rocking a little baby I could imagine was me. But my mom never said much about my baby self. She didn’t have any pictures of course, and she once said with a snort that my first word was “wah.” She wouldn’t even tell me what she’d chosen when the commune did the vote for my name. “Madeline’s all your dad,” she insisted, but I knew from stories that everybody wrote down the names they wanted and put them in a hat. For a while I thought about that a lot, the names she might have liked, such as Winter or Juniper or Ark. I thought about those baby days and maybe names (Canidae, I thought with longing, when I was doing my wolf project in eighth grade), until it dawned on me at some point that maybe my mother wouldn’t say, not because she’d wanted something else, but because she’d suggested nothing at all. And then I began to wonder, who besides my dad had wanted Madeline? Who else had voted for that?

I’m not saying I ever consciously wished there’d been someone else. And I’m not saying this thinking happened all at once, because it didn’t. It came over me gradually, almost unremarkably, in a way that seemed to move on a separate plane from all the other events in my life. I can’t attach it to anything that happened, to a year in school or a particular thing my mother did or didn’t do, but once the thought was there it didn’t go away. “The CEO’s doing her accounts!” she’d say, for instance, and my scalp would tighten like a cap above my ears. Or she’d dangle some decorative lure she was making in front of my nose while I was connecting dots in my workbook, and I’d have to lay my pencil down. I’d have to release that pencil like it was a match in a newly lit fire. Look up at her. “Hush!” she’d say to herself then, seeing the dark expression on my face, but not the plea, never the bald desire to be treated more gently. She’d whisper, “The Professor’s at work! Shhh! Everyone be quiet.”


Or she’d knock the air between us with the hand she wasn’t using for driving. She knocked the air and kept her eye on the highway.

“Earth to Mad-e-line. Did you hear what I said—” And before I knew what I was doing that day in the truck, before I could stop myself, I was croaking out, “Did I do okay?”

“You mean—?”

I waited, felt the truck’s engine churning us down the road. Missing, churning again.

She thought about it for a while before saying, “What happened probably would have happened whatever you’d done. If that’s what you mean.”

I returned my head to the lip of the door, watched clouds swell over other clouds that might have been smoke.

She tried again. “I’m not the judge of this one.”

You only say that because I’m not your kid, I remember thinking, rolling my forehead grease against the window, making it look like some wide, unidentifiable insect had flown against the glass. It’s hard now to know how much of what I did and wanted in those years came from some version of that thought.


What’s the difference between what you want to believe and what you do? That’s what I should have asked Patra, that’s the question I wanted answered, but it didn’t occur to me—or not in that way—until after we’d talked that day in the courthouse parking lot, until I was riding with my mother in the hot rumbling truck and she was parking between two vans behind Our Lady. While my mom wrote a thank-you note to tuck under the visor, I got down on my haunches in the gravel parking lot, my salad dress pouffing around me, and started sifting through the little stones. Then my mom came up, said okay, and we started back. As we walked along the highway shoulder, I uncurled my fingers and let the stones fall out. She didn’t try to talk to me anymore. She let me dawdle and lag behind, dropping rocks as I went. She glanced back at me once at the turnoff to the lake, but by the time I reached the sumac trail, by the time our cabin chimney was visible again over treetops, she was out of sight. She was a rustling of sumac branches, leaves moving in a pulse as she passed underneath.


And what’s the difference between what you think and what you end up doing? That’s what I should have asked Mr. Grierson in my letter—Mr. Grierson, who, even after Lily took back her accusation, was sentenced to seven years based on the pictures and his courtroom confession. I read through his statements in the months after his sentence, which he served first in Seagoville, Texas, then in Elkton, Ohio. The Gardners, who’d been charged with manslaughter, were acquitted after three weeks on the grounds they were protected by religious exemption. I didn’t follow them after the Whitewood trial ended. After I said my piece in court, I went home with my mom in the borrowed truck, ate three peanut butter sandwiches in a row, went fishing for pike. Went fishing, got drunk for the first time, forgot. Their cabin sat empty across the lake for months, and I never went back, and I didn’t stop to watch when the new owners set up their grill and badminton net the next summer. But I tracked Mr. Grierson around the country when he got out of jail, followed his little red flag from state to state, from Florida to Montana and back again. I watched him return to prison for violating the terms of his parole, get out again after another year, set up his shop in the marshes. By the time I wrote him my letter, by the time I was living in Minneapolis with Ann, I’d read his official statement about Lily several times. “I thought about it, I thought about it, I thought about it,” he’d said. He went on a few sentences farther down: “I wanted to, and when she said that I had, I was like, yes. When all that stuff was found in my apartment, I pretended I’d never seen it before. I did lie about that. But when that girl Lily said what she said, I thought, all right. Okay. Now my real life begins.”