History of Wolves(74)

22


THE FIRST DAY OF TENTH GRADE I GOT UP EARLIER THAN I NEEDED TO. As my parents slept in the room behind the kitchen, I got dressed—jeans, green wool sweater, boots—and pumped the little propane stove next to the sink. At first, the blue light of the gas was all I could see by, but as the water began to thrum in the pot, a bit of the gray September day showed itself through the one window. Pines shivered in the wind off the water. I filtered coffee through a wet cloth, poured the oily black brew into my dad’s thermos. Nestled the thermos in my backpack. The dogs whined even after I let them out of the shed, pulling on their stakes, dropping dew from their chains. They’d become accustomed to me again over the summer. They’d come to expect more than a pat or two, though I didn’t have time for that now. I poured their kibble sloppily, shoved their four bowls against the woodpile. They were always hungrier than they were affectionate, anyhow. They didn’t look up again once they got their breakfast.

The highway was empty, still. Early fall fog clung to the trees on the edges, muffling sounds, making the five-mile walk into town a long slide from one four-foot patch of asphalt to the next. I swung my arms against the chill. I got my heart going, and once I did I couldn’t slow it down again. When I got to Main, I took a sharp right behind Katerina’s gas station. It didn’t look like she’d opened the place up yet. The Plexiglas window on the side of the shop was still dark. Out back, she had the hides of two bucks strung up on poles, which would have interested me usually, but I was in a hurry and didn’t stop. I followed the wet woods path past the old timber mill, whose charred black boards rose higher than the pines and got lost in the fog overhead. I kept going. I went around to the bank of Gone Lake, where I knew Katerina kept a second aluminum canoe, unused for years.

After a few minutes of searching, I found the battered canoe sunk in cattails and mud a little way down from the creek mouth. Wading into the mud, I turned the thing over—first draining the water—and cleaned the mucky seats with the sleeve of my sweater. The sun was burning the fog off the lake now. The surface dimpled with minnows below and water striders above. I dipped the paddles in the cold creek water to rinse them clean, then propped them up against the beached canoe. All ready to go. All ready for Lily.

Back in town, back at the baseball field behind the school, I sat down on the batters’ bench and waited. I knew Lily’s dad usually dropped her off not far from here on his way to the forest service station. If she was coming to school, if she was coming at all, I meant to head her off on the way to the door. I had something to give her, and I wanted to give it to her in the canoe. My idea was to tell her I’d gotten a letter in the mail from Mr. Grierson. And if she didn’t believe that, I’d explain how close we were, Mr. Grierson and I—closer than it seemed—because of History Odyssey. I’d written the letter myself the night before. I’d snuck a beer from the shed and a good ink pen from my mom’s craft supplies beneath the sink. Sitting cross-legged in my loft after my parents went to sleep, I’d written on a yellow legal pad in careful block letters. I’d only had to think of Patra kneeling in front of Leo in the hotel to get the picture I needed in my head. After that the words came easy.

I had this letter for Lily, sealed. I wanted to take her somewhere she couldn’t get away while I watched her read it. The canoe in Gone Lake would be perfect, but if that made Lily suspicious then it could be the woods behind the gas station where Katerina kept her buckskins and bloody axes in pails. Or I could do it here at school, if she wouldn’t go with me to the lake, here in the stiff grass with the hockey players watching. They could watch if they wanted. In the end I didn’t care. Somewhere between home and the baseball field I’d gotten angry. Somewhere between August and September I’d grown a pins-and-needles feeling on my neck and scalp, a tightness in my chest that almost never went away. I couldn’t bear to walk down Main Street anymore, even to get tackle at Bob’s shop, because that’s where the bank was with my babysitting money inside. I couldn’t go by the elementary school or even to the Forest Service Nature Center, which used to be my favorite place in the world. I couldn’t go anywhere or be anyone. I was trembling as I waited in the baseball field. I was hoping Lily would arrive before the final bell rang.

I saw her dad’s pickup a few minutes after the last busses took off. He did a little half turn against the curb, so a mess of two-by-fours and an open cooler slid around in the bed. I stood up and shakily drew the letter from my pocket. Seeing that pickup arrive when I wasn’t sure she’d come at all—seeing Lily open the passenger door—made everything else I would do to her seem inevitable. Now things would simply run their course. Now, one way or another, she would see this was not playing, what she’d said, that you couldn’t just do whatever you wanted to someone and get away with it.

When she climbed out of the cab, I saw her hair was wet. It swung in clumped ropes on either side of her head, and she was strangely unsteady. She had to hold the pickup door with two hands as she got out, and for a second I thought, Oh no, she’s drunk, but then I saw she had a belly so big that her red hoodie didn’t quite cover it. So big, I could almost see the baby inside her when the sun hit her skin, the outline of a terrible tiny person there, I swear—

—but no, it was just her veins, a branchwork of purple lines that were covered again when she pulled down her shirt.