Chapter 2 #2
I stand up. I take off the rest of my clothes — boots, jeans, shirt, the leather cuff on my wrist that I never take off — and I leave them folded on the chair because I am not going to be human for the next twenty minutes and I would prefer not to come back to a torn shirt.
I am not vain. I am efficient. I shift in the doorway because the doorway is the only space in the cabin big enough, and I feel the wolf come up easily for the first time in years — easily, willingly, the way he used to before the road — and then I am four-legged and I am at the boy's side and I am nudging him with my shoulder.
He gets up. He is unsteady. He almost falls off the table.
I catch him with my flank, and he steadies himself against me, and then he is on the floor and I am ahead of him at the door and I look back at him once and he looks at me and his tail moves — once, low — and I take that as a yes and I lead him out into the snow.
The snow is cold and clean and it goes up between my toes and the air is the air of the mountain at night and I have not run in the mountain at night in a long time.
I do not run a route I know. I run a route the wolf knows.
I take the boy along the edge of the woods where the snow has been packed down by the older wolves running last week and the going is easier, and he stumbles only twice, and the second time I stop and wait for him until he is up and beside me.
We go to the creek. The creek is half-frozen.
He noses at the ice and then at me, asking, and I show him how to crack a thin spot with one paw and drink from the open water.
He drinks. He drinks for a long time. He has not had water since the rest stop in New Jersey and his body has just done the hardest physical work it will ever do.
When he is done drinking he sits down in the snow beside me.
He leans against me.
His shoulder against my shoulder. His ribs under my ribs. His breath against my flank. He leans, the way a pup leans against his father after a long hunt, and the wolf in me does something I have not let the wolf in me do in seventeen years.
He grieves.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. He just — sinks.
The full weight of him drops down into the bowl of my chest and he keens, very low, very quiet, where the boy beside me cannot hear, and the keen is a sound that has been waiting in my body since the day my brother went into the ground and never came back, and I let it.
I let the wolf grieve. I do not interfere with it.
I sit in the snow with my dead brother's son leaning against my flank and I let my wolf cry the way I never have, and I hold still, and I do not move, and the boy presses closer because he is exhausted and warm and pack and he does not know what his uncle's wolf is doing and he does not need to know.
We sit there for ten minutes.
Maybe twelve.
Then I stand up. I nudge him with my muzzle. We go back. He walks better now. He is starting to figure out the leg-coordination. He is going to be a beautiful runner. He has his father's gait.
At the cabin door I shift back. He follows my lead — and his shift back is rough, awkward, painful, the way a first shift-back always is — and he ends up on the porch on his hands and knees in his own naked human skin, gasping, hair in his eyes, ribs heaving.
I put my jeans back on. I pick up a quilt from the bench by the door — Della has thought of everything, Della has put quilts on the porch — and I drop it over his shoulders.
He looks up at me.
His face is Ronan's. His eyes are not. His eyes are Willa's. The grey under the brown, the steel under the soft. He is going to grow up to have a face that is half-and-half and it is going to be a good face, an honest face, a face people trust.
He says, "Did I do okay?"
His voice is hoarse.
"You did great," I say. "You did better than great. Your father was the strongest wolf I ever knew. You're going to be stronger."
It is the first kind thing I have said about my brother in seventeen years.
It is the first true thing I have said in seventeen years.
The wolf in me, inside, sits down at my brother's grave and puts his head on his paws and stays there, and I do not move him, and I do not ask him to come back inside, and I think — for the first time — that maybe I am not going to be able to keep him in the place where I have been keeping him.
Maybe he is going to do what he wants now.
Maybe the boy on the porch in front of me is going to pull him the rest of the way out.
I help Callum to his feet. I open the cabin door.
Willa is by the table. She is holding herself. Della is in the corner pretending not to watch. Jo is by the kettle pretending not to watch.
Willa looks at her son. She looks at me. She does not say anything.
I say, "He's all right. He's going to sleep for about twelve hours."
She nods.
I walk Callum to the bed. I lay him down. I tuck the quilt around him the way I have not tucked anyone into a bed since I was twelve and my mother died and I started doing it for my brother because there was no one else to do it. Callum is already asleep before his head touches the pillow.
I stand up. I get my coat. I get my boots.
I do not look at Willa. I cannot look at Willa.
I open the cabin door and I walk out into the snow and I keep walking.
I walk past the tree line. I walk into the woods, deep, past the creek, until I cannot see the cabin lights anymore.
I sit down at the base of a pine. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
I have not cried since I was twelve.
I cry.
I do it quietly because I am still a Sinner and a Sinner does not howl in the woods even at his own grief, and I sit there for a long time with my back against the cold trunk and my hands over my face and the wolf in me — the wolf who has been sitting at my brother's grave for the last hour — leaning against the back of my ribs and grieving with me.
The boy is alive. The boy is alive. I did not kill him. I helped him through.
It is not enough. It is not anywhere close to enough. The thing I did seventeen years ago is not paid for and it is not going to be paid for and the boy is not the payment, the boy is not penance, the boy is just a boy who is now my responsibility forever whether I deserve him or not.
I sit in the snow.
I let myself be what I have not been in seventeen years.
I let myself be his uncle.
I let myself grieve.
And somewhere six miles east of where I am sitting, on a mountainside I have not visited since the day I covered it with stones, the wolf in me lies down beside my brother and stays there, and the night holds, and the mountain holds, and I am — for the first time in a long time — not entirely alone in my own body.