Tell the Wolves I'm Home (26 page)

“No, not really,” he said. “Well, maybe for stupid fiddly things. I can't write or paint or draw. Nothing useful. And it's just my hands, really. Look at the rest of me. Clumsiest man on earth.”

“So, like a superhero with one power.”

“I wouldn't go
that
far. Anyway, what's yours, then? What's the one superpower of June Elbus?”

I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands.

“Heart. Hard heart,” I said, not sure where it came from. “The hardest heart in the world.”

“Hmmm,” Toby said, tapping a finger in the air. “That's a useful one, you know. Very handy. The question is …” Toby paused like he was considering this all very seriously.

“What's the question?”

“The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt?”

Toby took his time, neatly folding away all the little parts of the flea circus. He might have kept the apartment a mess, but he seemed to take extra care to make sure the flea circus was packed away neat and
tidy. I wondered how many times he'd been down here, talking to his invisible fleas, while I was upstairs with Finn. I wondered if Finn had bought him that flea circus. I wondered if Toby hated me. If maybe he hated my whole family. I couldn't have blamed him if he did. He closed the top of the box and hooked a rusted latch into a catch.

“How did you meet Finn?” I asked.

Toby frowned. He took a sip of whiskey, then tapped the edge of his crystal glass. “Oh, nothing interesting. An art class.” He stood up and walked to the bookshelf, turning his back to me. He ran his hand along the spines of those red field guides. “Finn said you two used to go to the Cloisters a lot.”

I could tell he was trying to change the subject, and I didn't want to let him.

“I thought you didn't do art,” I said.

“No, I'm not good. It was just a class. That's all. So, tell me, what do they have at the Cloisters, then?”

“You've never been?”

He shook his head.

I turned away quickly, because I didn't want him to see my smile. I didn't want him to catch how happy it made me to know that Finn had saved that special place for me.

“Go on,” Toby said. “Tell me what it's like. I want to know.”

“Really?”

Toby nodded, and I started to picture the Cloisters in my head.

“Well, it doesn't look like much from the outside. That's the first thing. But once you get in it's like you're not even in New York anymore. Not even in America.”

I told him how the very second you got in the doors it was like you'd been lifted right out of the city and into the Middle Ages. I told him about the wide, curving stone steps that took you up to the main cloisters and how the walls were made of big blocks of stone, just like in a castle. Toby sat himself down cross-legged on the rug to listen, and I told him about the herb gardens in the courtyards. Lungwort and bryony and comfrey and yarrow.

In my mind, I was there walking with Finn. Him rubbing a leaf
between his fingers for the scent. Telling me about the doctrine of signatures, which meant that God had signed every medicinal plant so you could tell what it would cure. Red ones for blood disorders. Yellow for jaundice. Other plants I didn't even remember the names of, with roots shaped like hemorrhoids or kidneys or the heart. Finn said it was all nonsense but that it was a nice idea. Nice to imagine someone signing their name to the world. I didn't tell Toby about that. About Finn and me there. I stuck to the hard, graceful curve of the stone over the archways and the cobblestoned paths and the impossibly detailed tapestries. I never mentioned a word about Finn, but still, when I looked down, I saw that Toby's eyes were wet with tears.

“What is it?”

He wiped his eyes and tried to put on a smile. “I don't know,” he said, laughing a little bit. “Everything, I suppose.”

And right then I felt my heart soften to Toby, because I knew exactly what he meant. I understood how just about anything in the world could remind you of Finn. Trains, or New York City, or plants, or books, or soft sweet black-and-white cookies, or some guy in Central Park playing a polka on the harmonica and the violin at the same time. Things you'd never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you'd want to show. “Look at that,” you'd want to say, because you knew he would find a way to think it was wonderful. To make you feel like the most observant person in the world for spotting it.

I sat down next to Toby on the floor, close enough so our arms almost touched. We sat there for what seemed like a long time, neither of us saying anything, until finally Toby broke the silence.

“You do know that if you ever need anything, you can ring me, right? Anything at all.”

I nodded. “You always say that.”

“But I want you to know that I mean it. I'm not only saying it to be nice. You can ring me the same way you would have rung Finn. Just to talk or anything. Anything at all.”

I told him I knew that he meant it, but I could tell the tone of my voice was saying that I'd never actually call. That he wasn't Finn. And
even though he sounded like he meant it, deep down I had a feeling he
was
just saying it to be nice.

“I should probably get going,” I said.

Toby offered to walk me to Grand Central. The weather had changed while we were buried in the basement. When I left school there were only a few clouds, but by the time we left Finn's building the whole sky was dark. We'd only walked a few blocks when the first fat raindrops splashed down.

“Shit,” Toby said. “No umbrella.”

We ducked into a deli, hoping maybe we could wait it out, but after we'd made three rounds of the aisles, the guy behind the counter stepped out and asked if we needed any help. Toby told him we were just looking for some mints, and the guy pressed his lips together hard and pointed to the candy rack in front of the register.

We walked downtown in the rain, both of us sucking on those hot, spicy mints we hadn't meant to buy. When the spiciness started to kick in, I almost spat mine out, but then I didn't. I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take.

Toby asked me for one of my Finn stories. I hesitated for a few seconds, deciding, then finally I told him about how once on Thanksgiving, when everyone else was watching the football game, Finn and I snuck out of the house and walked into the woods until we were lost. “Just the two of us,” I said, “because we hated football.” I told Toby how good the woods smelled and that Finn made us a little campfire using only sticks and then we sat huddled in close and Finn taught me what all the Latin words in the
Lacrimosa
part of Mozart's
Requiem
meant, and we sang it over and over again in our wobbly singing voices until I knew all of it by heart. I said that Finn told me he wanted to stay there forever, that he never wanted to go back to the city again, but he knew he couldn't. Then, I said, we followed our tracks home and saw that we weren't even very lost at all. When we got back, my mother had two pieces of pumpkin pie with Cool Whip saved for us, and we ate them without telling anybody where we'd been.

“Hmmm. That's quite something, June.”

“Yup.”

Toby started telling me about this time Finn tried to disguise himself so he could go to an exhibit of his own work and hear what people were saying about it. Toby rambled on with his story, but I was drifting away until all of a sudden the shiny roundness of a rain-slicked manhole caught my eye and I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

Toby kept walking.

“Hey,” I shouted to him. “What do you know about those buttons? Those black buttons on the portrait?”

Toby was a few steps ahead, but he heard me and stopped. He didn't turn right away. For a few seconds he just stood there. When he finally did turn around, he had a pleading expression on his face. He looked guilty and embarrassed, and I could see that he knew exactly what I was talking about.

He pulled me over to the side, so I was standing under the little awning of a building while he stood right out in the rain. Then he started apologizing again and again before he told me what happened.

“All right,” he said, like he'd reached some kind of decision. He breathed out long and slow. “This is really hard.” He paced across the sidewalk before spinning around and coming back.

“You don't have to tell me,” I said, though I didn't mean it.

He seemed to think about that for a moment before shaking his head. He paced away from me then back again before saying anything. “Okay, well … The portrait looks good, right?”

I nodded.

“But Finn didn't think so. ‘It has to be perfect. More detail. It needs more detail.' That's what he kept saying. He'd get me to bring it to him. Next to the bed. He could hardly see, hardly lift his head. If you'd seen him … It was all he could talk about, June. Do you see? And so I promised. I said I'd do what I could. I'd make it perfect.” Toby hung his head. “There. All right? Now you know.”

I pictured those clumsy buttons, and even I couldn't believe that Toby would think they made the painting better. He must have seen the look on my face, because right away he said, “Yeah. I know. I completely bollocksed it. But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then … and then it was just me.” I watched his face, and I could see he was going back to that day. “It was
so, so quiet, and I thought if I could only make something right. One thing … and I couldn't even do that. Not even black buttons.”

My heart was pounding because I couldn't help picturing the apartment on that day. Finn suddenly still and gone. Toby desperate and fumbling. I bit my lip because I could feel the twitchiness at the corner of my mouth that meant I was going to cry, and I didn't want to cry in front of Toby. Rain dripped from my soaked hair down across my face, and Toby's dark eyes were staring into mine, waiting for my response. I wasn't going to cry. I wasn't, but then all at once the tears were there, unstoppable.

I started to walk away, but then I turned back. I decided to stop even trying to hold back the tears. I decided to stand there under an awning on Madison Avenue and let Toby see me. Let him understand that I missed Finn just as much as he did. And once I started, there was no way of stopping. Everything that had been squashed down and pressed into a hard tight ball in the center of my heart came undone. I stood there, shaking and heaving on Madison Avenue in front of Toby, waiting for him to run away or shove me into a taxi, but he didn't. He stepped in, put his long arms around me, and leaned his head on my shoulder. We stood there under that awning until I could feel that he was crying too. The click of Toby's mint against his teeth, and the high squeal of car brakes, and the rain plinking on the canvas over our heads all joined with our low deep sobs to make a kind of music that afternoon. It turned the whole city into a chorus of our sadness, and after a while it almost stopped feeling bad and turned into something else. It started to feel like relief.

When we pulled apart, I couldn't look Toby in the eye.

I heard him whisper, “Sorry.” I heard him say, “I'm not an artist, June. I'm so sorry … for everything. All of it.”

I gave the tiniest of shrugs, then I spat my mint into my hand and tossed it onto the sidewalk.

“These are gross,” I said.

Toby smiled.

“Yeah,” he said. But he didn't spit his out. He kept it in his mouth, where it must have burned at his tongue until it was all gone.

Thirty-Seven

It was late at night. That same day. Way after everybody was fast asleep. I was sitting in the kitchen, on the floor, with the
Book of Days
open on my lap. I cupped my hand around the phone receiver and whispered.

“I'm calling to tell you that I made it all up.”

“Oh … right. You what?” Toby's voice sounded dopey, like I'd woken him from some thick kind of dream.

“The story. My Finn story. It wasn't true.”

“Oh. It's you, June. Hi. What time is it?”

“Late. Sorry for waking you up.”

“I wasn't sleeping. Just resting with some brandy.”

I laughed with my mouth closed, trying not to make any noise. I reached over to the cabinet next to the dishwasher. The thin one that was my parents' liquor cabinet. I looked around until I saw the brandy. I set it on the floor next to me and tapped my finger against the top of the bottle.

“Anyway, so I still owe you a story.”

“Are you sure yours wasn't true? I, for one, believed every word.”

I smiled, even though I thought Toby might be making fun of me. “Come on.”