Tell the Wolves I'm Home (15 page)

“You know what Megan said when I told her my uncle died of AIDS? Guess. Take a guess.”

“Come on, Greta. We have to go.”

“No. This is the best, June. You'll love this. Megan looked at me all serious and said, ‘Wow, that would be a great college essay. You'd be a shoo-in with something like that.' ” Greta laughed and laughed. She sat down on the road, shaking with laughter until she started coughing and coughing.

“Come on,” I said.

“But it's funny, right? Right?”

“Yeah, really funny, Greta. Hilarious.” I reached for her hand to pull her up, but she snatched it away. She stopped laughing and her face went suddenly hard.

“You think I didn't want to keep going to Finn's because I didn't care? You really think this person who I've known forever is dying and I don't care?”

Before I could say anything, she pushed herself up from the street. She flailed her arm at me dismissively and then she ran. I watched her lurching ahead, body on the edge of tipping over, stumbling down the road toward home.

The night air revived Greta enough so she could walk upstairs without falling, change into pajamas, and get into bed.

I changed out of my smoky clothes, then went down to tell my parents that everything was okay.

“You know, June,” my mother said, “I can't tell you how glad I am that you and Greta are starting to do things together again.”

It felt like even nodding would be a kind of lie.

Twenty-Three

This is what was in that brown paper bag from Toby:

I scooted onto my bed and pressed my ear against the wall. When Greta and I are in our beds, our heads are right next to each other. If the wall wasn't there, we'd be lying side by side. I listened for a minute to make sure she was asleep, and when I heard nothing I unzipped my backpack and spilled the tapes out onto my bed. I recognized them right away.

They were from this one Sunday when Finn took me to Tower Records' Classical Annex on 4th Street; he bought four different versions of Mozart's
Requiem
so we could decide which one was the best. I didn't even know that it came in other versions until Finn showed me.

He said it'd be like the Pepsi challenge, where we chose without knowing which version was which. I had this bad feeling that they'd all sound the same to me and I'd have to look stupid in front of Finn, but that's not what happened.

“You'll be surprised how different they all are,” he said. He had a little half smile, and I could tell that he'd seen what I was thinking.

We took a taxi back to Finn's apartment, and when we got there he
made a pot of tea in the Russian teapot and put out a great big bowl of red-shelled pistachios. Then he pushed the coffee table out of the way so we could lie flat on our backs on his beautiful Turkish rug. And then we listened.

Two of the versions were so different it made me angry. They actually had different endings, which Finn told me later was because Mozart never really finished the whole
Requiem
before he died and even now people argue about which part he didn't write and how those parts should go. But I didn't care. It just sounded wrong to me. Even the other two weren't as good as our old version, the one we listened to most of the time, and I said that to Finn.

He looked kind of sad after that. He patted me on the shoulder and told me that he knew what I meant. That usually the first version you hear is the one you'll love for the rest of your life.

The other thing in the bag was a note. This is what it said:

After I read the note, I spilled out all the money Toby gave me. There were all kinds of bills—ones and fives and twenties and even fifties. It came out to $763, which was more than I'd ever had in my life. I felt like a thief with all that money. Like a thief once removed, because it felt to me like Toby was the real thief.

I put everything in the back of my closet with the teapot and the
first note from Toby, and then I fell asleep. The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.

Twenty-Four

“Get a look at this.” My father handed a folded-over page of the Sunday
New York Post
to my mother. She was at the kitchen counter, chopping mushrooms for omelets.

“What is it?”

“Just have a look.”

She wiped her hands on a towel and leaned over my father's shoulder. He raised the article up. As she read, lines formed on her forehead. She turned away.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“It's something to think about though,” my father said.

Greta was still asleep so it was just me and my dad at the table, waiting for our omelets. We both liked mushroom and Swiss. I sipped my orange juice from an old scratched-up Welch's jelly-jar glass that had bits and pieces of Fred Flintstone's orange caveman suit on it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” my mother said. “Put it away.”

My dad gave me a helpless look, like if it was up to him I could have seen the paper. He held on to it for a second.

“She's fourteen, Danni.”

“I don't care.” My mother snatched the page out of his hand. “And that's that.”

I took the last sip of my juice.

“I'm not a baby,” I said, to back my father up.

My mother sighed and put down her knife. She looked me up and down and sighed again. “I know, Junie. I know.” She glanced at the paper, then back at me. “Here,” she said, and put it in my hand.

I was expecting another article about the portrait. What I wasn't expecting was a big headline about some soldier who'd done it with both a man and a woman even though he knew he had AIDS. Now all three of them had AIDS, and the soldier was probably going to jail for it.

“So?” my father said.

“I don't know.”

“That man—that Toby. It makes you think.” My father didn't look me in the eye.

“You think he should go to jail?” I thought of the train. I thought how he'd brought those tapes to me all the way from the city. I thought how he didn't seem so bad.

“Yeah, of course he should. He
is
a murderer.” The voice came from the doorway. Greta stood there, leaning against the wall. There'd been a rehearsal the night before and she had gray smudges of makeup all around her eyes, which made her look like some kind of ghoul. She stared right at me. “Isn't he?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

I didn't know what to say. Greta hadn't said a thing to me since the party two days ago. Now she stood with a cup of coffee in her hand, thinking she was cool. She'd started drinking coffee only a couple of weeks ago, but she acted like she'd been drinking it her whole life.

“Why does everything need to turn into an argument with you two?” my mother asked.

Greta only smirked.

Later that same Sunday, Greta and I were sitting at the kitchen table, finishing off homework. It was snowing, just lightly, and my mother had made us both mugs of hot chocolate. She was hanging around the kitchen looking like she was waiting for something to happen. She'd been like that a lot since Finn died. Once, when she didn't know I was watching her, I saw her pick up the phone receiver, hold it up to her
ear, and stand there like that, waiting. She never dialed. Now she stood there, staring at the toaster.

“Girls,” she said after a while. We looked up. “These are for the two of you.” She held out two little brown envelopes, one with my name on it and the other with Greta's.

“So what's in them?” Greta asked.

“Keys.” My mother pressed an envelope into each of our hands. “If you go to the Bank of New York on North Street, you can look at the portrait anytime you want. Either of you.”

I peeled my envelope open and let the key slide out onto my palm.

“Box number 2963. That's all you have to tell them. Then they'll take it out and put it in a private room and you can take as much time as you want.”

“Like I'm ever going to do that,” Greta said.

“Nobody's saying you have to go, Greta, but it's your painting. Yours and June's, and you should be able to see it whenever you want. That's all.”

I dropped the key back into the envelope. I thought I would put it in the back of my closet with the notes from Toby and the teapot and those tapes of the
Requiem
. I thought I might never go to look at the portrait, but I wasn't sure.

Greta slugged down the last sip of her hot chocolate, said, “Whatever,” picked up her key, and walked right out of the kitchen without looking at me once.

After dinner, after everybody had forgotten all about the newspaper, I pulled out the page about that soldier. I read it again and I hated him. How could someone be so selfish? I would never get on a train with someone like that. I would never take a donut from him.

I folded the article up, put it in an envelope, and wrote Toby's name and Finn's address on it. I got a stamp from the desk drawer in the living room, licked it, and stuck it on. I looked at it. I could send it just like that, but I didn't. I wrote my name and address in the top left corner. I wanted Toby to know it was from me.

A few days later I got a letter back. I was usually the first one home to get the mail, but Toby didn't know that, so he'd gone through a lot of trouble disguising it. The envelope was big and brown and had a return address from the League of Young Falconers typed out on the front, which made me smile, but only for a second, because almost right away it bugged me that Finn had told him about the falconing thing. At first I almost thought it was junk mail, except that my name and address were handwritten. Inside were a few folded sheets of blank paper, to bulk the letter up and make it look real, and one sheet with writing on it.