The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(50)

“When Thomas was a little boy,” I said to Cantor, “he thought he could fly.”

It just came out of me.

I turned so I was facing Cantor.

“I know I’m his sister. But I’m telling you for the last time that Thomas would never do something like this.”

Cantor said, “He didn’t.”





Fifty-Seven



FOR THE SECOND TIME in a little over a month, there was a funeral at the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. It was the Thursday after Thomas died.

The coverage of Thomas’s death over the past few days hadn’t been as lurid as I’d expected it to be. Somehow Cantor, who had fast-tracked the toxicology report, had managed to keep it out of the media that there had been both alcohol and heroin in Thomas’s system when he died. But the world knew about the needle and all about Thomas’s drug-filled past, chapter and verse. At least neither Wolf.com nor the Tribune had published the pictures of Thomas’s broken body draped across two seats in section 115 of Wolves Stadium, which ghouls could easily find on the internet.

I still hadn’t said a public word about Thomas, letting the PR department issue a release about how the entire Wolf family and the entire Wolves organization were grieving the tragic loss of Thomas Wolf. I knew people were going to think what they wanted to think, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I knew by now that there was nothing better than an easy story, and they thought they had one now.

Former addict goes back to using and kills himself.

One of Thomas’s grade-school friends had also told Seth Dowd that Thomas as a boy had thought he could fly, and Dowd, along with everybody else, ran with that for a couple of days.

My mother had said that it would be impossible for her to get through a eulogy for Thomas. She had, she told me, always stayed out of the spotlight even when my father was alive, and that wasn’t going to change now. Danny said he didn’t want to speak. So there would be two eulogies in addition to the monsignor’s. First Jack’s, then mine.

I sat next to my mother in the front pew. This week had presented the first opportunity to spend any time with her since Dad died—initially at the house on Jones Street, then at the wake. Now here. Before that, the only time I’d laid eyes on my mother had been when I’d seen John Gallo walking out her front door. It had seemed tremendously important at the time, seeing my father’s sworn enemy kissing her hand like some gentleman caller when I knew Gallo was the opposite of that.

She’d asked at the wake why I hadn’t been around to see her more.

“I’ve been busy,” I said.

“Too busy for your own mother?” she’d said, fixing me with the same icy glare that she’d always used on all of us, one I was certain she practiced.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Have I done something to offend you?”

It almost, but not quite, got a smile out of me.

How much time do you have?

At one point during the mass, she reached over and tried to take my hand. I casually shifted position and moved it away from her.

The church wasn’t as packed at it had been for my father. Still, there were only a few empty rows at the very back. Some of the people, I knew, were there out of curiosity, because Thomas was a Wolf and because the family had recently suffered two mysterious deaths. And because of the death-plunge coverage about the boy who thought he could fly.

I looked up as Jack got out of his seat at the end of our row and walked up to the pulpit.

When he got there, he started off by saying, “Brothers fight. You can look it up. It’s right there on the first page of the manual. Brothers start to fight when they’re kids, and they keep fighting until they’re a lot older.” He paused and put his head down and looked up.

“They still act like kids no matter how old they are,” he continued.

He took a deep breath. I saw that he had no notes with him. But if this was nothing more than an act, if Jack were just playing the part of an older brother in mourning, he was doing a good job of it—at least so far—sounding human for once in his life.

“So Thomas and I fought,” he said. “Anyone who knows either one of us, or both of us, knows that’s hardly breaking news. But he was my kid brother, and nothing was ever going to change that. In my mind, he was still twelve years old.”

He seemed to be staring out to the back of the church, not at any of the faces in front of him.

“Oh, we kept fighting, all right.” Jack smiled. “I’m sure you’ve all been reading about that. But we’re Wolfs. It’s what you do in our family. Sometimes we’d go at each other as soon as one of our parents finished saying grace.”

Another deep breath.

“I went at him, and I went at our father even harder,” he said. “And what kills me is that the last thing I remember when they were still here was fighting with both of them.”

He stopped then, for what felt like a long time. Then he shook his head and held up his hands as if surrendering to the moment and started to cry before he walked down from the podium, taking his seat and staring straight ahead.

If it had been an act, I thought, it was some acting job, even for him.

My turn then.

I thought about starting with a joke as I made my way past Jack, saying that I wanted to apologize to Monsignor Galardi in advance, but that seeing my brother Jack cry had to mean that hell had likely just frozen over.