Tell the Wolves I'm Home (12 page)

When we got to Gasho, we followed the hostess to one of the high tables and climbed onto our stools. Each table seated maybe twelve people around a big grill, and the chef was at the other end hacking up some meat with a little hatchet. My dad ordered two glasses of Japanese beer. Then he looked at us and asked if we wanted Shirley Temples.

“I'm not, like, three years old, you know,” Greta said. “I'll have a Diet Coke.”

“I guess I'll have a Coke too,” I said, even though really I would have liked a Shirley Temple.

And that's about the most conversation we had all night. I don't think anybody in that restaurant would have been able to guess that we were out having a birthday celebration. My dad asked Greta how the play was going, and all she could say was “Fine.” My mother remarked on a change in the menu, but that's as good as it got. None of us were Finn sort of people. I tried to remember one of the Victorian games, but nothing came to me. Maybe more was said, maybe some words disappeared into the sizzling peppers and onions, but that's how I remember it. I sat there watching the Japanese chef with his high white hat frying our dinner and wondered what would happen to me without Finn. Would I stay stupid for the rest of my life? Who would tell me the truth, the real story that was under what everybody else could see? How do you become someone who knows those things? How do you become someone with X-ray vision? How do you become Finn?

On the way home, I thought about the note from Toby again. I thought about how March 6 was only three days away and how stupid it would be for me to go meet him. Again I thought that I should go to my parents and tell them all about it. Tell them that this guy came right up to our door. That he'd asked me to meet him. That he'd asked me to keep it a secret. It wasn't too late to tell them everything.

My parents trusted me. I knew they did. And they were right to. I was a girl who always did the right thing. But this was different. I knew Toby had stories. He had little pieces of Finn I'd never seen. And the apartment. Maybe there would be a chance to see the apartment again. My mother would call it scraping the bottom of the barrel. Looking for the very last crumbs. My mother would call it being greedy, but I didn't care. If you think a story can be like a kind of cement, the sloppy kind that you put between bricks, the kind that looks like cake frosting before it dries hard, then maybe I thought it would be possible to use what Toby had to hold Finn together, to keep him here with me a little bit longer.

Nineteen

“Party. Tomorrow night. One hundred percent. No cancellations.”

Greta had come into the bathroom while I was in the shower and whispered through the coral pink shower curtain.

“What?”

Greta said it again, slower, as loud as she could without our parents hearing. I still couldn't hear her right, so I turned the shower off and rubbed the water out of my ears with my palm. I stuck my head out from behind the curtain.

“What?”

She let out a frustrated breath, then said it one more time. That time I heard her.

“Mom and Dad will be at work until seven and then we can just tell them you're helping with the play again. Okay?”

I nodded, but my thoughts were racing. The party was the same day as the meeting with Toby.

“Okay?” Greta said.

“Yeah … I guess. Okay.”

“It's in the woods behind the school.”

My woods. The party was going to be in my woods. I smiled to myself. For once I'd know more than Greta. I'd be the only one there who knew anything about the place.

Greta stood there with her hands on her hips, looking at me like
she was waiting for me to say something. “You know those woods, right?”

“I … yeah. The ones you can see behind the cafeteria.”

She waited another few seconds, then nodded.

I turned the shower on to full again, letting it pound against my neck.

I could see the shape of Greta's forehead through the shower curtain, and I gave her a poke. She poked back, trying to nab my shoulder. We both laughed, poking blindly at each other through the pink plastic.

“Stop,” Greta said, but she was still poking.

I reached a wet arm out from the side of the curtain and tickled Greta right under her armpit. We both couldn't stop laughing.

“Girls?” My dad's voice boomed from downstairs.

I pulled my arm back.

“It's okay,” Greta hollered.

Every once in a while it was like that with me and Greta. Just for a minute or two. Just a glimpse of what we used to be like.

She stuck her head around the curtain, angling her face so she wouldn't see me naked.

“So you're still coming?”

“Yeah. Just go ahead. I'll meet you in the woods.”

Twenty

I wrote down some ways to hate Toby. I wanted to be prepared. I didn't want to show up all weepy and dumb. I wanted to be hard. I wanted to be able to tell him what was what.

I looked at the list, but I couldn't make it work. I couldn't seem to hate the guy. Finn didn't hate Toby. Finn might have even loved Toby. And Toby was probably the very last person in the world who'd talked to Finn, who'd seen him alive. So I added this:

That's when the list started working.
I
wanted to be the last one. Not some gangly English guy with a watery voice.

Twenty-One

If you stand on Sumac Avenue where it bridges over the train tracks and look out over the railing, you can see the whole train station platform. I turned up late, and I was freezing cold because I'd stuffed my stupid light blue puffy coat in my backpack. I'd taken the long way, up past the bike shop and the Mobil station and then across the weedy fields near the Lutheran church. As I got closer, I started to think that maybe Toby himself wouldn't show up. Maybe he would hide somewhere and watch and wait to see if I would come, just like I'd decided I was going to do to him.

I peered over the edge of the railing, trying not to get too close. I wasn't sure I would even recognize him, but I did. I saw him right away. He was sitting on a bench at the far end of the platform, his knees pulled up to his chest, his fingers fidgeting with his shoelaces. I could see that he was skinny, but not exactly in an AIDS way. He didn't look the way Finn did at the end. He looked like he'd always been like that.

I stood for a while, watching him. Every now and then he snapped his head up and looked around. Almost like he was spooked. Like he could tell I was there somewhere. Each time he did that, I jumped back out of his line of sight.

Toby looked younger than Finn. Younger than my mother or father. If I had to guess, I would have said he was around thirty, but I'm not good at that kind of thing. From where I was I could see his skinny
neck and his oversize Adam's apple poking out; his hair looked soft, like baby bird feathers dusted over his head. Toby stood up and paced down the platform. He wore a small blue backpack and he had on jeans and sneakers and a thick gray sweater with a red woolen scarf, but no coat. He didn't seem like anything special, and I wondered why someone like Finn would go out with him. He stared down the track, then glanced at his watch. I heard the noise of the train edging in.

Toby peeked down at his watch again, and then, before I had time to think, he looked right up to the spot where I was standing. I jumped back before he saw me, and right then I decided I wouldn't go down there. I wouldn't meet Toby after all. I couldn't bring myself to do it. What would I say? No. I wouldn't go down. I'd watch from above. I'd wait for the train to take him away. He'd get the message.

I inched back to my place and peered down. What I saw was Toby, looking straight back up at me, staring right at my spot. One hand was shading his eyes, and when he saw me he spread the fingers of his other hand and raised them in the smallest of waves. Before I could decide not to, I did the same. I edged a hand barely above the top of the railing and spread my fingers.

Then I smiled. It was only the barest of smiles, and it came out without me wanting it to. I don't know how I could have smiled at the man who killed Finn, but I did, and that seemed to seal something. It felt like that smile had locked me in, like it was some kind of promise that made it so I had no choice but to walk down that flight of steps to the platform.

Toby kept staring up at me with a sort of worried look. The way the light was pouring down on his face, the way his hand stayed raised, made it look like he was in a medieval painting, shielding his eyes from something bigger than himself. He pointed to the platform and nodded his head downward. And before I could stop myself, I was nodding back and walking to the covered stairway. It felt like I was moving in slow motion. Like the stairs might keep going down and down forever.

But when I walked onto the platform, it was light and warm and the train had just pulled in. Toby was walking toward me, with a smile that wasn't one of those adult smiles that's too big with no thinking
behind it. It was a real smile. Like he was so glad to see me he almost couldn't believe his luck.

“Come on,” he said, like we already knew each other.

It was a strange time of day. Most people weren't done with work yet, and if they were they were mostly headed north, coming home from the city. I walked onto the southbound train, trying not to think too hard about what I was doing.

The carriage we picked was almost empty. Toby pointed to a set of four seats, two facing two. “Here?”

I nodded and sat down. Toby sat in the aisle seat, diagonal from me. His knees poked out across the space between us, forcing me to lean in toward the window to avoid touching him.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. I could see him trying to make eye contact with me, but I didn't want that. I kept my head turned away, staring out the window at an Absolut vodka billboard on the platform. On the bottom someone had written
Def Leppard Rokz
, but someone else had crossed out
Rokz
and written
Sukz
in its place.

“It's okay,” I said, still staring out the window.

“You're not scared or anything, are you? Because I know what I must have seemed like on the phone and I know what your family thinks of me, and I was trying so hard to find some kind of way to talk to you.”

The train pulled out of the station, slowly rocking side to side.