Chapter 2 #2
"There was no clinic here, then. No Jo. The pack midwife was an older woman with good hands and forty years of experience and no equipment for what happened.
A hemorrhage. Fast. I was outside. I had been outside for two hours, because that is what husbands did then—we paced, we waited, we let the women do their work.
By the time they called me in, Elena was unconscious.
By the time the bleeding stopped, she was gone. The baby never breathed."
Rue is very still.
"I had been a mortician before the change," I say.
"In the human world. Trained, licensed, the whole apparatus.
I came up here when I was thirty, met Elena, settled.
I did not expect to use the training again.
The pack had its own way of handling the dead—rough, fast, the way wolves do when they are still mostly wolves and only partly civilization.
But Elena—" I stop. I take a breath. "Elena was not going into the ground that way.
Not while I had hands. So I built her coffin.
I built it in a single night. I built the baby's into hers, because I could not bear to separate them.
I dug the grave myself. I would not let anyone help. "
"Thaddeus."
"I am almost done."
She nods.
"When I came down the hill the next morning, the pack had been waiting.
Quietly. They had set up a kind of vigil for me at the bottom of the slope without telling me.
And the president at the time—not Conrad, his father—came to me and said, We need someone to do this work properly from now on.
You are the only one who knows how. He did not ask if I wanted it.
He told me. And I took it. Because the alternative was an empty cabin and a wolf I had stopped speaking to, and at least the work was honest. At least the work would let me be near her. Up here. Above the compound. With her."
I look up.
Rue is crying. Quietly. Not sobbing. Tears moving down her face in the unselfconscious way of a woman who has cried beside enough deathbeds to no longer care about whether the tears are dignified.
She does not say I'm sorry.
She says, "What was your daughter's name?"
I am still for a long time.
No one has ever asked me that.
The pack has, at various points over the years, asked about Elena.
Her name has been said in toasts at the chapter house and in prayers at the cemetery.
There is a stone in the graveyard with her name on it, and beside her name a second smaller line that reads only AND OUR DAUGHTER, because at the time we had not chosen.
We had not chosen, but we had been talking about it.
"Lily," I say.
The word comes out softer than I mean it to.
"We had not finalized. Elena wanted Lily. I wanted to wait until we saw the baby's face. We had—we had time, we thought."
"Lily is beautiful."
"Yes."
"Lily Mercer."
The wolf, who has been sitting up, lifts his head. Something inside me—not in the wolf, not exactly, but in the bone-deep part of me that has carried this name for fourteen years like a small smooth stone in a pocket—turns over.
I look at Rue, and Rue looks at me, and the morning light comes through the skylight and falls on the white oak lid with the initials I have just carved, and the wolf in the back of my mind opens his eyes.
He opens them.
He has not opened them in fourteen years.
He looks at her.
I am not afraid. I am not, exactly, anything I have a name for. I am simply present, the way I am present at a deathbed—aware of the room, aware of the breathing, aware of the slow turn of something that cannot be hurried.
"Thaddeus," Rue says.
"Yes."
"Thank you for telling me."
"Thank you for asking."
She wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist. She picks up her coffee. She takes a sip. She sets the mug down with a small precise gesture and stands.
"I have rounds," she says.
"I know."
"I'll see you tomorrow."
"Yes."
She moves to the door. She pauses. She turns back.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"The little piece of oak. The one you carved with HAZZ-ERD and the leaf. It's on my bedside table."
I do not know what to say.
"I just—I wanted you to know," she says. "I wanted you to know where it is."
She leaves.
I do not work for almost an hour after she leaves. I sit on the workbench with my coffee going cold in my hand and the white oak lid with its fresh carving in front of me and the wolf, awake for the first time in fourteen years, alert and attentive in the back of my mind.
I do not push him back down.
I let him sit.
I think about the small piece of oak. I had not, when I carved it, expected to know where she put it.
I had thought she might put it in a drawer, or on a windowsill, or—more likely—lose it somewhere in the chaos of a hospice nurse's life, the way small things get lost when a person is busy holding up the world for the dying.
She put it on her bedside table.
A bedside table is a particular kind of geography.
The things on a bedside table are the things a person sees when they wake and when they sleep.
A photograph of a loved one. A book they cannot finish in a single sitting.
A glass of water. A clock. A piece of oak with a word carved into it, and a leaf.
I get up.
I cross the workshop to the low shelf where I keep the small scraps—the offcuts, the pieces too small to use for anything substantial but too good to burn.
I sort through them. I find a piece of white oak about the size of my palm.
I sit down on the workbench and I pick up the smallest gouge and I begin to carve.
I do not know, yet, what I am carving.
I work for a long time. The light moves across the workshop floor. The shavings curl onto the bench. The wolf watches.
What emerges, when I finally lift my hands away, is a small wolf. Not a snarling wolf, not a heroic wolf, not the kind of wolf the club tattoos on its members' arms. A wolf at rest. Lying down. Head on its paws. Eyes open.
I set it on the workbench. I look at it.
I have not made anything for the living in fourteen years.
I put it in my pocket.
That afternoon, when Rue comes back up the path from Edwin's cabin, the small wolf is sitting on the step of her cottage.
I do not see her find it. I do not need to.
I am back in the workshop carving the inside of the lid—a final, quiet carving Edwin asked for and that I have not told anyone else about, the silhouette of a white oak in summer, leaves out, branches spread, exactly the way the tree he fell out of at nine looked from the inside when he was climbing it.
I am carving and I am thinking about a hand reaching for a coffin made of light, and I am thinking that the woman in the dream was Rue Whitaker, and I am thinking that I am no longer afraid of the dream.
The wolf is awake.
He is going to stay awake.
I do not know yet what we are going to do with each other, the wolf and I, after fourteen years of careful sleep.
I do not know what I am going to do with myself.
I do not know what I am going to do with Rue Whitaker, who is at this moment, presumably, sitting on the step of her cottage with a small carved wolf in her hand, the way she sat last night with a piece of white oak that said HAZZ-ERD.
I know only this.
I have carved two things for the living in two days, after fourteen years of carving for the dead.
I am going to carve more.