Theft (27 page)

I
T CAME OF A sudden. It always worked that way in tracking. Following imprints left over after the animal had disappeared was like reading a story, each imprint a word left on the earth telling a tale that, with any luck, I could step into and become a part of by the end of the story. At home, it was the wolves, the sudden appearance of them across a landscape. Here, it was my brother. He'd risen up from the two-dimensional tracks: my own flesh and blood sitting on the edge of a precipice. Even from a distance I could see his body, as angular and lean as it was when he was a kid. I wanted to sit back and watch for a while, to savor this time before he discovered me, before he understood the reason I was there.

I was scared. I was excited. I was terrified. But it was like we were connected again, like that hook I'd felt back when we used to fish together was still in me and the line between us was unbreakable. I walked toward him, making my way through the wooded land below his cliff. The area was rife with mountain lion sign, no lion in sight at the moment, but fresh sign all the same. The snow
fell lightly. I walked. Occasionally, I lost sight of the cliff where he sat, the trees obscuring my line of sight. But he stayed in that one spot. He had set up some kind of camp on this overlook. It seemed like an exposed hiding place for a fugitive, and his decision made the kid in me smile. He had never been predictable.

His hair was longer than I'd ever seen it, past his shoulders. It was the coldest part of the night, the sun rolling around somewhere on the other side of the globe, leaving us to the frozen darkness here, and even so, as far as I could tell, Zeb was not wearing a shirt. I had the urge to keep him warm and protect him. I needed this time with him. I missed our connection.

The trees thinned out, and I was at the base of the granite cliff where he sat. From there, I had to scramble on all fours to reach him. The rocks were jagged, and my gloves were too thick for me to get a good grasp, so I took them off, and the icy granite stung my fingers. The only way up was a twisted route behind the face of the cliff. Occasionally the climb turned to flat sections where I could rest. I sat with my back to the wall and closed my eyes, trying to sort it all out before I met him again. Nothing came but tears.

That's when I felt his presence. I didn't hear him until he sat next to me, on the cliff, and I opened my eyes, and I said his name. “Zeb.”

He didn't say anything at first, just wrapped his bare arms around me and held me. He said, “It's been so long, so long, so long,” not really talking to me, just letting these words spill out of him. “Willa, it's been so long.”

I wanted so much to be able to let my arms wrap around him, too, and I did, but not with the openness I'd hoped for. There was this stupid grudge straight-jacketing me with the promises he'd made long ago, promises I'd believed: that he was going to heal mom, fix the family, find a way out for all of us. They were all just kid's dreams that were never real anyway. But he dreamed them with such violence and desperation that they seeped over into me, and I dreamed them right along with him, believing. He made me believe, goddamnit, and there he was now, again, making me believe that his arms wrapped around
me were real and strong and good and that this was not just a passing thing, but something I could depend on. He kept holding me and rocking me and saying my name, and eventually I felt myself holding him, too, and it felt good and sad and confusing, and I felt myself letting go of my age-old grudge. There was nothing now but us: my brother and me.

When he finally let his arms drop, I knew what it meant to be numb. It began in the marrow of my bones and radiated outward. It was not that I felt nothing. It was that I felt everything all at once, and I couldn't name anything except two huge feelings: this utter numbness; this love. I didn't want to think about Polo. I wanted the reason I was there to go away. I wanted to sit with my brother forever. That was everything.

For a little bit, that's exactly what we did. We sat with our legs dangling over the granite ledge, looking out across the meadow. The snow had quit falling now, but crystals still drifted from the branches of trees.

“How'd you know it was me?” I asked.

He laughed a little. “I always know what I'm looking for,” he said, just like he used to say about stealing, aware of everything inside a house before he even broke in. “And because you're my sister,” he said. “And because those are some smart guys down there, bringing in a tracker like you.”

Nothing he said made sense, and all I could think about was the fact that he was shivering. “Aren't you cold?” I asked.

I touched his bare skin, and he took my hand away and assured me he was warm. “It feels good to me out here,” he said. He opened his arms slightly to the sky.

I had so many words piled up inside me, but my feelings stifled anything I wanted to say, except, “I've missed you, Zeb.” I wanted to tell him I'd had no idea how to reach him over the years, but that was a lie. I had never really tried. There was no way to explain this to him because I was so different than he was: What I went in for, what I wanted most, was always the same thing that made me back away. He had always called it smart and cautious. I only felt it as fear.

So for now, we just sat silently. The snow had stopped, and there was a window of sky that was clear and round and shiny as a black widow's abdomen, stars like little red hourglasses splattered across it. In the distance, I saw a lantern turn on in Polo's tent. I shivered, pulled my shirt tighter around me.

“Yeah,” he said. He laughed a little. “They actually sent you.”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled the same kid-smile he always did under similar circumstances.

“You telling me you knew they'd send me, Zeb?”

He shook his head. “I didn't
know
.” He held out a little longer. “I did what I could. And then, I hoped. I really hoped they'd send you. Didn't think they would, though,” he said. “Didn't think they were smart enough to find you. I never could.”

“What do you mean? You tried finding me?”

“Every chance I got. Truck stops, late night, sitting at the computer tables. Other guys looking at porn or whatever, and there I am, Googling my little sister.” He laughed, making fun of himself. His life over the past years came clearer to me now. He had a mundane job, lived a responsible life; he was an adult, something I never could fathom he would actually become. “And—I know you're a tracker,” he said. “That much I know. That's why I hoped like hell they'd send you when I ran. But I kept reading about you tracking wolves somewhere in New Mexico, and I could
not
figure out where that place was. If I could've, I'd have been there, Willa.” He looked down and shook his head, and his long hair fell over his bare shoulders. “I'd have been there.”

His words tugged on me. I looked for a response that made sense. All I could say was, “Yeah, they keep it pretty quiet, the place I work. It took them years to show me the compound. It's a kind of halfway house for the wolves they plan to release.”

He laughed a little. So did I, but neither one of us knew why we were laughing.

“Well, you do good work, Willa. You've always done good work.” There was a silence between us, and then he said, “So, you going to turn me in?”

“No.” I said it quick as a reflex. “I never had any intention of that.” I was too tense to smile with him now, too serious. “I came because I was scared,” I told him. “And to see you.”

“Scared?”

“That this was a set up.”

“It
is
a set up. They're here to take me in.”

“No. They're not going to do that, Zeb.”

He laughed.

“No way,” I said.

He gave me the big brother look that told me he knew more than I could begin to fathom. He shrugged. “Anyway, why the hell would
you
be scared?”

My guts quivered. “I thought they knew something about what I did back then,” I said. “I thought they had something on me.”

“Ah, Willa. Nothing you ever did was bad. It was all me. It was always all me.”

It was all I could do to keep from holding him and making him warm now. I didn't want him sitting next to me and shivering so much in the cold. My throat ached, and the words felt impossible. Our past enveloped me, and I was shivering right along with him, like when I was a kid. And then I said, out loud, for the first time ever, “I was there with Mom, Zeb. I helped Mom on her last day. I helped her die. She asked me to, and I did. It was the same thing you did to Chet, Zeb, but she was my mother, our mother. I killed our mother.”

His back stiffened in a way I remembered from when we were kids, and he took a deep breath. “Christ,” he said, through his teeth. It frightened me. “Does Dad know?”

“I never told him. But he figured it out.”

“That's why—”

“That's why he shut down, yeah.”

He stared straight ahead, trying to make sense of it all.

“You talked to Dad since you left?”

I shook my head, my teeth chattering and my head pounding with a spinning ache. I wanted him to hold me. But he sat staring straight ahead, saying nothing. Finally, he sighed, a huge sigh as if
he'd been holding that single breath since I last saw him. “My god, it's not the same thing, Willa,” he said. His voice was firm, but not angry. “You were helping someone. I wasn't helping anyone.”

“Dolly.”

“No. It's like instinct in me, something that won't go away once it turns loose in me. It's not the same thing at all.
Not at all
.”

I couldn't hear his words. They blurred all around me. “You don't know.”

“I
do
know,” he said. “There's a lot I don't know. But I
know
that. It was not the same.” His arm was still around my shoulders, and he pulled me closer to him. “I can't believe I left you to do that. Alone,” he said. His voice softened. “What—what did she say to you? What did Mom say?”

“She asked me to help her. She didn't want to go, Zeb, but she was barely living, and there was no way to change it or make it better or—”

“No. On the day she died. Did she say anything to you, like something to help us now, you know, something to keep us going?”

I wanted to answer him, but I couldn't remember anything about the day itself, just the last breaths my mother took, how there was no separation between us at all, and then there was only separation. A kind of permanent separation I'd never felt before and had not stopped feeling since. I felt myself growing smaller and smaller and pretty soon, I was curled up in Zeb's lap. I cried until everything turned grey inside me and there was nothing left. He didn't move, didn't say a word the whole time. He just sat with me.

“I'm sorry,” I told him. “I'm so sorry.”

He shook his head and pressed his finger to my lips. Then he sat perfectly still and stared at nothing, blinking deliberately and slowly, as if each movement he made, even his breathing, came from a clear decision. He stared for a long time, and after a while, he took out his Zig-Zag papers and rolled a smoke with that same slow deliberation that had become his way. He didn't light the cigarette, just licked the seam of it, and held it in his hands. “My god. We were so . . . small,” he said.

“We were kids.”

“No. We were smaller than kids. We were nothing.” He was not speaking to me, just speaking out into the air. We sat, my brother and I, in the night, in the mountains, the place we'd always dreamed of when we when we were kids. I always thought when we met again we'd have so much to say. But instead, there was a deep quiet between us. It was not the same quiet as the distance we'd been stuck in. It was comfort. It was home. We sat for some time saying nothing. After a while, I asked him, “So you were smart enough to think they might bring me here. What now?”

He didn't respond.

“You always know. You always have a plan. Tell me you have something, some way out of this for us both.”

Still nothing. There was this understated way about him now, something I'd never expected of him, not when he was a kid. All that agitation he'd had, it seemed to have evaporated like so much mist. He didn't fidget when he had nothing to say. If he wasn't ready to talk, he just sat quietly. It was unnerving in almost the same way his fitfulness was when he was younger. Eventually, he tried to answer me, but the sentences came out flat and plain and had nothing to do with the plan I needed to know about. “Everything was broken,” he said. “You go back and look at it now—it's all broken up, that field we played in every day, the place we lived, the house where Mom grew up, our lives, everything—sounds like a small thing, like nothing, really. But it got to me somehow.” He said, “It made me crazy, Willa. It didn't mean a thing to anyone else, that land, but that was our lives there.”

I couldn't help but be concerned about the cold on Zeb's bare skin, but when I drew attention to it again, he brushed me away. But I kept at it, offering him my jacket and begging him to keep warm. My insistence broke his stare and his rambling. “Leaving was all I could do,” he said clearly now. “I was scared about killing Chet, yeah. But that wasn't everything. That wasn't the only reason I left.” He explained how he'd hidden out for a long time, five years or so. He'd lost track of the time during those years, so he was not sure. He was barely seventeen years old, and he'd squatted on
some land in the mountains, lived in a tent year round, sold cords of wood in the winter, done odd jobs for families, and worked illegal trades now and then when nothing else came through. I tried to imagine my young, scruffy-Elvis brother living the life he was telling me now. It felt distant, and at the same time, it got under my skin; I knew the images of him struggling like this would never leave me. He told me he'd sold pot and had run other drugs. He'd gotten to know truckers this way, had made connections, and had friends scattered all the way from Maine to California.