Tell the Wolves I'm Home (2 page)

That afternoon we sat for an hour and a half while Finn painted us. He had on Mozart's
Requiem
, which Finn and I both loved. Even though
I don't believe in God, last year I convinced my mother to let me join the Catholic church choir in our town just so I could sing the Mozart
Kyrie
at Easter. I can't even really sing, but the thing is, if you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.

The
Requiem
was a secret between me and Finn. Just the two of us. We didn't even need to look at each other when he put it on. We both understood. He'd taken me to a concert at a beautiful church on 84th Street once and told me to close my eyes and listen. That's when I first heard it. That's when I first fell in love with that music.

“It creeps up on you, doesn't it,” he'd said. “It lulls you into thinking it's pleasant and harmless, it bumbles along, and then all of a sudden, boom, there it is rising up all menacing. All big drums and high screaming strings and deep dark voices. Then just as fast it backs right down again. See, Crocodile? See?”

Crocodile was a name Finn invented for me because he said I was like something from another time that lurked around, watching and waiting, before I made my mind up about things. I loved when he called me that. He sat in that church, trying to make sure I understood the music. “See?” he said again.

And I did see. At least I thought I saw. Or maybe I only pretended I did, because the last thing I ever wanted was for Finn to think I was stupid.

That afternoon the
Requiem
floated over all the beautiful things in Finn's apartment. His soft Turkish carpets. The old silk top hat with the worn side to the wall. That big old Mason jar filled to the top with every possible color and pattern of guitar pick. Guitar pickles, Finn called them, because he kept them in that canning jar. The music floated right down the hallway, past Finn's bedroom door, which was closed, private, like it always was. My mother and Greta didn't seem to notice the way Finn's lips moved along with the music—
voca me cum benedictus … gere curam mei finis …
They had no idea they were even listening to a death song, which was a good thing, because if my
mother had known what that music was, she would have turned it right off. Right. Off.

After a while, Finn turned the canvas around so we could see what he'd done. It was a big deal because it was the first time he'd let us see the actual painting.

“Take a closer look, girls,” he said. He never talked while he worked, so when he finally spoke, his voice was a thin, dry whisper. A flicker of embarrassment shot across his face, then he reached for a cup of cold tea, took a sip, and cleared his throat. “Danni, you too—come in, have a look.”

My mother didn't answer, so Finn called into the kitchen again. “Come on. Just for a second. I want to see what you think.”

“Later,” she called back. “I'm in the middle of something.”

Finn kept looking toward the kitchen like he was hoping maybe she would change her mind. When it was obvious she wasn't going to, he frowned, then turned to stare at the canvas again.

He pushed himself up from the old blue chair he always painted in, wincing as he held on to it for a second, steadying himself. He took a step away and I could see that, other than the green tie at his waist, the only color Finn had was in the little splotches of paint all over his white smock. The colors of me and Greta. I felt like grabbing the paintbrush right out of his hand so I could color him in, paint him back to his old self.

“Thank God for that,” Greta said, stretching her arms way above her head and giving her hair a shake.

I stared at the portrait. I saw that Finn had put me slightly in the foreground even though we weren't sitting that way, and I smiled.

“It's not done … is it?” I asked.

Finn came over and stood next to me. He tilted his head and looked at the portrait, at the painted Greta, then at the painted me. He squinted, looking right into the eyes of that other me. He leaned in so his face almost touched the wet canvas, and I felt goose bumps prickle on my arm.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, still staring at the portrait. “Not quite. Do you see? There's something missing. Maybe something in
the background … maybe a little more with the hair. What do you think?”

I breathed out and relaxed my chest, unable to hold back a smile. I nodded hard. “I think so too. I think we should come a few more times.”

Finn smiled back and rubbed his pale hand across his pale forehead. “Yes. A few more,” he said.

He asked us what we thought of the painting so far. I said it was fantastic and Greta didn't say anything. Her back was turned to us. She wasn't even looking at the painting. Both her hands were in her pockets, and when she twisted slowly around, her face was blank. That's something about Greta. She can hide everything she's thinking. The next thing I knew she'd pulled out her mistletoe and was standing there holding it up in one hand. She waved it in an arc like she was cutting the air above our heads, like she was holding something more than just a scrap of Christmas leaves and berries. Finn and I both looked up and my heart seized. We looked at each other for the amount of time that's maybe one grain of sand in an hourglass or one drop of water from a leaky tap, and Finn,
my
uncle Finn, read me—
snap
—like that. In that tiny slice of a second, he saw I was afraid, and he bent my head down and kissed the top of my hair with such a light touch it could have been a butterfly landing.

On the ride home I asked Greta if she thought you could catch AIDS from hair. She shrugged, then turned and stared out the window for the rest of the drive.

I shampooed my hair three times that night. Then I wrapped myself in towels and crawled under my blankets and tried to sleep. I counted sheep and stars and blades of grass, but nothing worked. All I could think of again and again was Finn. I thought about his soft kiss. I thought about how just for a second, just as he'd leaned in to me, AIDS and Greta and my mother had disappeared from the room. It was only Finn and me in that tiniest of tiny moments, and before I could stop myself I wondered what it might be like if he really did kiss my lips. I know how gross that is, how revolting, but I want to tell the truth, and
the truth is that I lay in bed that night imagining Finn's kiss. I lay in bed thinking about everything in my heart that was possible and impossible, right and wrong, sayable and unsayable, and when all those thoughts were gone there was only one thing left: how terribly much I was going to miss my uncle Finn.

Two

Going into the woods by yourself is the best way to pretend you're in another time. It's a thing you can only do alone. If there's somebody else with you, it's too easy to remember where you really are. The woods I go to start behind the middle and high school buildings. They start there, but they stretch up north for miles, toward Mahopac and Carmel, and then farther, to places I don't know the names of.

The first thing I do when I get to the woods is hang my backpack on a tree branch. Then I walk. To make it work you have to walk until you can't hear any cars at all, and that's what I do. I walk and walk until all I can hear are the little cracks and snaps of branches and the swish of the brook. I follow the brook to a place where there's a crumbling dry stone wall and a tall maple tree with a rusted-out sap bucket nailed just above head height. That's my place. That's where I stop. In the book
A Wrinkle in Time
, it says that time is like a big old rumpled blanket. What I'd like is to be caught in one of those wrinkles. Tucked away. Hidden in a small tight fold.

Usually I put myself in the Middle Ages. Usually England. Sometimes I sing snatches of the
Requiem
to myself, even though I know the
Requiem
isn't medieval. And I look at everything—rocks, fallen leaves, dead trees—like I have the power to read those things. Like my life depends on understanding exactly what the forest has to say.

I make sure I bring along an old Gunne Sax dress of Greta's from when she was twelve. It's way too small for me, so I have to wear a shirt
underneath and keep the buttons open at the back. It looks more like something out of
Little House on the Prairie
than anything medieval, but it's the best I can do. And then there's my medieval boots. Anyone will tell you that shoes are the hardest part to get right. For the longest time I only had plain black Keds, which I would try hard not to look at, because they ruined the whole thing.

I got the boots, which are black suede with crisscross leather laces right up the front, at the medieval festival at the Cloisters with Finn. It was October, and Finn had already been painting the portrait for four months. This was the third time he'd taken me to the festival. The first time it was his idea, but the other two were mine. As soon as the leaves started to brown and curl, I'd start pestering him about it.

“You're becoming a regular medievalist, Crocodile,” he'd say. “What have I done to you?”

He was right. It was his fault. Medieval art was Finn's favorite, and over the years we'd spent hours and hours looking through his books together. This third time at the festival, Finn was already getting thin. It was chilly enough for wool sweaters and Finn was wearing two, one on top of the other. We were drinking hot mulled cider, and it was just the two of us, alone with the greasy smell of a pig roasting on a spit and lute music and the whinny of a horse about to go into a fake joust and the jangling of a falconer's bells. Finn saw the boots that day and bought them for me because he knew I'd love them. He stayed with me at that bootmaker's stall, tying up rough leather laces for me again and again like there was nothing he'd rather be doing. If they weren't right, he'd help pull the boots off my feet. Sometimes his hand would brush my ankle or my bare knee and I'd blush. I didn't tell him this, but I made sure to choose a pair two sizes too big. I didn't care how many pairs of socks I'd have to wear with them. I never wanted to grow out of those boots.

If I had a lot of money, I would buy acres of woods. I would put a wall around them and live there like it was another time. Maybe I would find one other person to live with me there. Someone who was willing to promise they'd never speak a word about anything in the
present. I doubt I could find anyone like that. I've never met anyone yet who might make that kind of promise.

There's only one person I've ever told about what I do in the woods, and that's Finn, and I didn't even mean to tell him. We were walking back to his apartment from the movie theater after seeing
A Room with a View
. Finn started talking about how all the characters were so enchanting because they were so tightly wrapped and it was so beautiful to watch them try to unwrap one another. So romantic, he said. He said he wished things were like that now. I wanted him to know I understood—that I would do anything to go back in time—so I told him about the woods. He laughed and bumped his shoulder against mine and called me a nerdatroid and I called him a geek for spending all his time thinking about painting, and then we both laughed because we knew we were right. We both knew we were the biggest nerds in the whole world. Now that Finn's gone, nobody knows that I go to the woods after school. Sometimes I think nobody even remembers those woods exist at all.

Three

The portrait was never given to us. Not officially. Not with words.

That's because it was never finished. That's what Finn said. We had to keep going back for just one more sitting and one more sitting after that. Nobody argued about it except Greta, who stopped going to Finn's on Sundays. She said if Finn was only doing the background, he didn't need all of us there. She said she had other things, better things, she could be doing with her Sunday afternoons.