Little Wolves Read online

  It was the kind of night that made the girl and her father think of the mother, a night when he knew his daughter would bother him long after bedtime, waking him from a deep slumber to ask if she could sleep in his room, because she couldn’t stand to be alone. Not when there was a wind outside, a wind with claws.

  He came into her room, a thin man, already graying in his early thirties, his eyes deep-set in their sockets like those paintings she had seen of Keats as a consumptive. He smelled of scotch and Marlboros. He had been a Latin teacher once, a man fluent in a dead language, before the state phased it out of the curriculum. “Tell me a story,” she would beg. “Please.”

  He sat beside her on the bed. Sometimes he held her hand in his, touched the ends of her ghost fingers as if the story hid there. This was all he could bear to tell her. “Once upon a time,” he began.

  A baby girl was born, entering the world covered in a fine wolfish pelt that darkened her cheeks, shoulders, and back. When they lay the baby on her mother’s belly, the woman recoiled. The girl’s eyes were narrowed to canine slits, and even her cries sounded like subdued yelps. No one in the room, not even an elderly nurse who had seen thousands of births in her lifetime, spoke at first. Then the doctor handed the father gleaming surgical scissors and told him to cut the bloody cord. “Mein Gott,” the mother said when she found her breath.

  “Go ahead,” the doctor encouraged behind his face mask, showing the father the bloodied clip where he’d pinched off the placenta. “Cut right here.”

  The baby’s father nodded. He muttered some reassurance to his wife. Hearing her father’s voice, the baby stretched forth one tiny hand. Such ancient hands they seemed to him, all pruned and wrinkled. Old soul. It was as if his wife had given birth to a little furry old person now reaching to take hold of him. The baby squalled this whole time, raspy-sounding hiccups like it was drowning in its own fluids. The father reached out with his other hand, and the baby grabbed his pinkie and held on. This touch startled them both and hushed the baby. The father’s eyes filled, and he could not speak. Then a new calmness entered him, and he did what was necessary and cut the cord and let the nurse bundle the child away.

  He reached for her in the shocking moment of her birth and would go on reaching until he breathed his last. The baby weighed only four pounds.

  A little monster, that’s what her mother thought she had birthed. She was being punished; her sin had stained even her womb. She tried to breast-feed the thing and failed. Pale, exhausted, she would go on spilling bloody clumps between her legs long after the doctors sewed her up. It was as if the birthing had torn something out of her, something terrible and secret that she would never have again. And the baby reminded her of nothing more than a runt kitten, something too small and wounded to survive. Slate gray eyes and mewling. “Take it away,” she told the nurse. “I need my rest.”

  If the child had been born with a caul instead, the mother might have known what it meant and not been so unnerved. She would have dried and preserved the caul and then pinned it to a wall above the bed to keep the child from changing into a werewolf when the moon fattened. But this glistening gray fur that covered the entire body, as fine as corn silk, disgusted her. The mother was frightened of wolves, and here one had come from her own belly.

  She didn’t know all fetuses were furred for a time in the womb, and that babies born more than a month premature, like this one, sometimes still bore a vestigial reminder of humankind’s bestial origins. By the time the young doctor came to explain to the mother why her baby appeared so freakish, it was too late. He tried naming the condition, telling her it was called lanugo and that it would last a few weeks before the fur was absorbed into the body. “Your baby is small but fierce,” he assured her. “She is going to live.”

  Much later that night, as the woman’s husband slept in an armchair beside her, the nurse wheeled the child and her cradle into the room and left again. When the mother awoke, it was waiting for her, and she knew what she had to do. Quietly, wearing only her hospital gown, she snuck her husband’s keys from the lamp stand and took the baby and walked barefoot into the snowy parking lot and was not seen again.

  “She was crazy, wasn’t she?”

  “She gave birth to the child, but she was no mother.”

  “How come?”

  At such moments his pretense fell away, and the girl knew he was picturing her mother as he had first known her and not this fairy-tale vision he had made up for her.

  “She was from a faraway place, and she had seen terrible things. She was unwell. Sometimes, women will get really sad after a baby is born, even though it should be the happiest moment in their lives. Sometimes this sadness eats them up and they do something bad.”

  “Tell me the rest. About the wolves and the baby in the snow.”

  “That’s enough for tonight.”

  Set it down. That was what her father wanted. The lanugo had long been a memory she carried inside her, but Seth’s death and her own impending motherhood awakened it again. Would such sadness also enter her, make her do something awful? Was she even fit to be a mother? Some nights she swore she still sensed the lanugo, a second, bristling existence under all that smooth skin. Fur and wildness. When the moon swelled, she imagined shucking off this outer layer and padding on all fours through the woods. A wulvas heo. There she smelled snow in the sharp cold wind, heard rabbits shudder deep in their warrens at the sound of her coming. This was how she had come to think of herself. Look inside the fierce brown eyes her mother gave her, and you would see she was still a wolfgirl all these years later.

  SHARDS

  Logan was already gone by the time she came downstairs the next morning, but he had left Clara a to-do list, and number one on the list was the dishes, which she hadn’t washed in a few days. He had underlined this task so she would understand how important it was, a plea for a return to normalcy. Logan detested messes, and the entire kitchen had a sour smell, the same smell on her skin. Clara tore the list into pieces that she left for him on the table and then set to making cinnamon rolls, Pillsbury, in the oven.

  She ate the rolls on the living room couch and licked frosting from her fingertips. The shades were drawn against the day; outside big trucks lumbered past on the one road leading out of town, rattling the glass in the window casings. All the world on the move now, headed elsewhere. Clara sank into the cushion, a pillow propped behind her to support her back, her mind thick with sugar and dough.

  The night before Logan had awakened her past midnight. “This is killing me,” he said in a drained voice.

  “Logan?” His body curled under the blankets in a fetal position, so she touched his hip. “What are you talking about?”

  He grumbled something more, still fast asleep she realized, talking to someone is in his dreams. Clara couldn’t be sure she’d heard him right.

  She reached under the covers, found his wrist, felt the erratic wingbeats of his pulse under his skin. “What’s killing you?” she whispered, afraid of what he meant, not wanting to wake him up. She had not slept well the rest of the night and a nap was in order this morning. She shut her eyes and drifted off on the couch.

  When she woke, Logan was standing over her, his brow furrowed. He must have found the to-do list she ripped into pieces. “Come eat,” he said, “I made soup.”

  “I didn’t even hear you come home. Wow, I was really out of it.”

  Logan didn’t say anything as they sat at the table and mumbled grace and set to the soup, which still steamed. Silence and clinking silverware. How could she be hungry again so soon? While she ate her soup, she searched her mind for the right words, something inane about the weather to break the tension.

  “I wish you wouldn’t eat like that,” Logan said.

  She had been enjoying her meal until then, the hot salty broth. “Like what?”

  “That slurping noise. You don’t have to slurp it like a dog. Watch.” He dipped a spoon into the bowl, lifted out some soup, a
nd put it past his pinched lips.

  “Jesus Christ on a stick. Is that how you’re supposed to eat soup?”

  Logan set his spoon down, his face reddening. “Don’t mock me, Clara. I just wish you wouldn’t smack your lips all the time. I wish you would chew with your mouth shut.”

  Her eyes grew hot.

  “Oh, don’t. Not this again.”

  “Don’t what?” As if she could stop it.

  “It’s been this same weepy self-pity ever since Seth shot himself. You know what, Clara? That kid was a little shit. You wouldn’t believe the stories I’ve heard. He was a terror. This whole town is glad he’s dead.”

  She got up before she said something she regretted and carried the remains of her bowl into the kitchen, not wanting to look at him. She turned on the water. She didn’t mean to do it at first, but that china bowl was slick in her hands. The first one dropped with a crack into the hard stainless-steel sink and shattered into a thousand pieces. It was an accident, pure and simple. His mother’s bone china with the baby-blue etchings. That Dutch boy with his shit-eating grin and the little blue windmills. The sound of it breaking snapped something inside of her, too. One by one she lifted the dirty dishes stacked on the side and started slamming them into the sink.

  Logan shouted for her to stop. She heard a clatter as his chair fell over, and then he loomed in the entryway. Clara’s vision narrowed to a single red thread. Sometime during the shattering she had picked up a shard of pottery, and she clenched it in her palm.

  Logan was saying something, but she couldn’t hear a word. A roaring filled her ears. A sound like a growl from her throat. There weren’t any words in her mind anymore, just the sure knowledge that if he laid a hand on her she was going to gut him with the edge of this broken dish.

  Logan approached, his palms turned up, his arms spread. More words streaming out of his mouth, like he was calling her from a long ways away. Like she was falling down and down, and he was trying to reach her. Her eyelashes blinking furiously. His form blurring. A burning in her blood.

  Only a few feet away Logan paused. He was still talking, saying something over and over. The space between them disappeared. He touched her arm. She didn’t stab him. She didn’t stab him. He was saying, “Clara, it’s okay.” He was saying, “Clara you’re not in danger. No one is going to hurt you. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Then he held her in his arms. A deep shudder passed out of her, a moan. She buried her face in his shoulder and let the shard fall from her hand.

  He went away again; he had to. They were expecting him for the weekly service at the nursing home. He didn’t want to go; she saw it in his eyes. A wariness. Logan was afraid of what she might do. “I shouldn’t have said any of that,” he said. He tried to smile. Big black half-moons under his eyes, like someone had been punching him while he slept. The dark thing he had been talking to in his sleep. How had she not noticed his suffering?

  She wanted to tell him sorry, too, because she was, but her throat felt raw, like she had swallowed something so hot it scorched away the words. She was conscious of her bare feet on the floor. A barefoot, pregnant madwoman. She glanced to the window, wondering if the sound of breaking dishes had carried out into the neighborhood, if people had heard what was happening in the parsonage, if there were eyes upon them even now. She had come back to herself. She was safe in her kitchen, but something still bristled inside her. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure, but you shouldn’t talk to me like that. Ever.”

  “Agreed.” He licked his lips. “We’re supposed to make each other better people. That’s what marriage should be. Like two ropes woven together.”

  “And Seth Fallon may have been a little shit … but I can’t help feeling responsible.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” He was tender now, regretful. This was the man she had married. His blue eyes clear and pristine as some far northern lake. “You can’t save somebody if they don’t want to be saved.”

  “I know.” That wasn’t it, that wasn’t it at all. “You aren’t mad at me?”

  Dust from broken china was somehow on his clerical shirt, and he brushed it off. “No. Tell you the truth, I hated those dishes. Who eats off china every single day? I don’t want to think about my parents every time we sit down to eat.”

  “I lost it there.”

  “Yeah.” He exhaled heavily. “But I understand. You’ve been through a lot.”

  She had, but it didn’t excuse it. Violence, in her experience, was rarely premeditated. Clara remembered the first time her former fiancé Gregory had struck her. He was a coworker from the bank where she had been a teller, and it happened after a long day at work. They were sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor of his apartment, eating slices of take-out pepperoni pizza from a cardboard box set between them. They had not been arguing, nor could Clara even recall what they were talking about. The pizza grease was wet on her lips when Gregory got on his knees, almost like he was going to ask her to move in with him. The hope lit in her. They had been engaged for nearly a year, and Gregory was good to her, an attentive lover, a man only a few years older who was both cultured and successful. They hadn’t set a date, and Gregory put it off when she tried bringing it up. Clara remembered dabbing at her mouth with a napkin, tilting her chin, when his fist cracked her in the jaw.

  She remembered how her mouth filled with blood, how she lay stunned and gasping for breath for only a moment, and then he was pulling her toward him, begging forgiveness, saying “I don’t know what came over me” as he tried wrap her in a smothering embrace. Frightened, Clara had kicked him, her heel striking him in the ribs, and scrambled away on her knees. She only got a few feet before he grabbed her by the ankle, and when she fell she knocked over the lamp stand and everything on it, the bulb bursting, imploding really, his set of keys jingling when they struck the hardwood floor. He had her by the ankle, his words harder now, and he was pulling her toward his bedroom. Clara grabbed the keys and threaded them through her knuckles, like metal claws. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I didn’t mean to do it.” She curled into herself, playing wounded, but when he leaned down near her, Clara punched him with the sharp keys in her fist. The blow ripped skin from his cheek, and he screamed and reeled away. She had run out of the apartment, right through the broken bulb’s glass, in her bare feet, and then walked all the way home, constantly looking behind her, sure that he was going to come punish her for fighting back.

  The faucet was still running, so Clara reached among the shards to shut it off, her thoughts jumbled as something struggled to stand up inside her on newborn foal legs. She walked over to Logan and adjusted the tongue of white plastic, which had gone crooked in his black collar. She concentrated to keep her hands from shaking. “There, you can go now,” she said, because she couldn’t think right with him so close. “I’ll clean this up.”

  He touched her face. He swallowed, tried to find his words.

  “Go,” she said. “The old fogies are waiting for you.”

  CLARA DIDN’T CLEAN up the dishes right away, despite what she had promised Logan. Downstairs the kittens cried out to her. They had heard the uproar and must have been upset. On the stove she heated up milk in a saucepan. This she poured into a collection of medicine droppers for the kittens before trudging down to the basement.

  Even in the heat of early autumn the basement remained a cold, whispery place. Stairs painted red, a lipstick smear. Whitewash splashed on the walls to keep down mold, green copper pipes dripping, and the darkness at the bottom yawning like a mouth. There was no rail, so she braced herself against the wall every time she went down, one hand holding the medicine droppers, the other her belly.

  The kittens waited, ravenous. They needed their mother. Clara understood. The kittens’ mother, the cat she’d named Sorena, spent most of her time outdoors hunting gophers in the cemetery or sunning herself below the neighbor’s bird feeder. She did not waste time on feeding her babies. She knew win
ter was coming, and her babies were too small. They would have been dead if Clara hadn’t prepared a box for them, made a nest from torn newspapers, and moved it behind the old oil furnace where sunlight trickled in through a greasy window. Clara knew next to nothing about raising baby animals but was determined to keep them alive. And all that effort, what was it for? Logan was going to take them to some farm, where they’d surely die, though several days had passed, and he had not loaded them up to take them to the Nelsons.

  This was the same window where she’d looked out and seen Seth’s shoes, the ragged hem of his coat. That day she had felt a hand on her shoulder when she saw him. Icy breath on her neck. A voice inside her head. Don’t answer the door. Stay with me. The baby inside her going still. A quiet, commanding voice. What Clara had always imagined her mother sounding like.

  She picked up the kittens and held them against her, drizzling milk into their pink gums. “I’m sorry,” she told each one as she lifted it out. “But you can’t stay here anymore.” The kittens fought to reach her, and she had to lift them by the hackles to keep from getting clawed, though they were small enough to fit within the palm of her hand. The whole milk from the grocery didn’t seem to be providing enough nutrition. She needed to find the Nelson family in the church directory. You weren’t supposed to take kittens from the mother until they were at least six weeks old, and Clara was sure Sorena would run away. And yet so far something had kept the cat here. As she fed the kittens she hummed a tuneless nursery rhyme to drown out their mewling.

  Then the doorbell rang, silencing her song. The shock of the sound seemed to carry through the wires of the old parsonage because the bulb above her died with a fizzing pop.

  She stood uncertainly as darkness washed over her. The blood throbbed in the ends of her missing fingers. That old ache come back again.

  The dark was not complete. Sour gray light leaked in from the window. The bell rang again. She still hadn’t moved, waiting for her eyes to adjust. All she had to do was walk over to the window, but she was afraid of what she might see: those dirty shoes, the fraying edge of a coat. The figure she had seen at the edge of the corn. The bell rang and rang.