Chapter 3
Willa
It takes my son four days to come fully back into his body.
He sleeps for the first thirty hours. Real sleep, the dead sleep of a body that has been doing the work of two species at once and has been told, finally, that it can stop.
I sit on the floor beside the bed and read every book Della brings me.
I do not read them. I hold them. I turn pages.
I listen to him breathe. Jo comes by twice a day and checks his pupils and his pulse and the bruising along his ribs which has started, finally, to fade.
By the second morning the half-shifted hand is fully a hand again, just a hand, with five fingers and the same knuckles he had when he was sixteen, and I lift it off the quilt and hold it in mine and weep into it for ten minutes and put it back.
On the fifth morning he wakes up hungry.
That is how I know he is going to be all right. He sits up. He squints at me. He says, "Mom, I'm starving." It is the most ordinary sentence my son has ever spoken and I have to leave the room so he does not see me come apart.
Della cooks him eggs. He eats six. Then he eats four pieces of toast and a bowl of oatmeal and drinks three cups of water in succession, and then he looks at me with his hair sticking up in three directions and says, "Where am I?"
I sit down across the table from him.
I tell him.
I tell him as much as he needs to know and not yet the rest. I tell him about the compound.
About the pack. About his shift and what it means and where it came from.
About his father, in pieces, the gentle pieces, the pieces a seventeen-year-old can carry without dropping.
About Della. About Jo. About Conrad. I do not tell him about Kael.
I cannot get there yet. I tell him there is a man here who is family, who is going to teach him to use his wolf, and that he is going to meet that man this afternoon.
Callum chews thoughtfully.
"The man who carried me outside the other night," he says.
"You remember that?"
"A little. He was — he was a wolf. He was a big wolf. He told me I did good."
"That's him."
"What's his name?"
"Kael," I say.
I say it carefully. I am watching for the recognition. There is none. He has never heard the name. I have never said it in front of him. I made certain of that.
"Kael," my son repeats. "Okay."
He does not ask what Kael is to me. He does not ask what Kael is to him. He drinks his water. He goes to the bathroom. He comes back and asks if he can take a walk. Jo has cleared him for short walks as long as someone is with him. I say I will go with him.
We walk to the front porch, and the front porch is as far as he gets before Kael is there.
Kael has been outside the cabin for three days, I realize.
Not visibly. But always within range. I have caught him at the edge of the tree line once, in the dawn, smoking a cigarette he did not actually smoke, just holding it like a man who needed something to do with his hands.
I have seen him on the path to the clubhouse, three times, slowing as he passed our cabin like a man pretending not to look.
He has not come to the door. He has not knocked.
He has been waiting — not for me, for Callum, for the moment my son was upright and ready to be met properly.
Now my son is upright on the porch and Kael is at the bottom of the steps.
He is wearing a clean flannel. His hair is wet from a shower. He has shaved. He looks like a man who has been waiting to look his best for an introduction he is terrified to make, and the small foolish vanity of it makes my eyes sting.
"Callum," I say. "This is your uncle Kael."
My son looks at the man on the steps. He squints at him, the way he squinted at me an hour ago when he was first coming back into the world. Then he sticks out his hand. He says, "Sir."
Kael's face does something I am not going to describe. He takes my son's hand. He shakes it. He says, "Just Kael's fine."
"Mom says you're going to teach me about the wolf thing."
"That's the plan."
"Cool."
He says it with the seventeen-year-old casualness of a boy who does not yet have language for the seismic thing he is in the middle of.
Cool. I see Kael fight not to smile. I see the smile win a little, in spite of him, at one corner of his mouth — and then he kills it, the way he kills everything that gets up on his face without permission, and his expression goes back to the neutral, controlled, slightly-removed face of the man my husband used to call the wall.
"I figured we'd start slow," Kael says. "Walk the perimeter. Get you familiar with the grounds. We'll do some shift work later in the week when you're stronger."
"Today?"
"Today."
"Now?"
"If you're up to it."
Callum looks at me. I nod. He pulls on the jacket I hand him.
He clatters down the porch steps in boots that are too big — Della has brought him a pair of clubhouse spares because he came down here with sneakers — and he ends up at the bottom of the steps with his uncle and he stands there, looking up at Kael, and Kael looks down at him, and neither of them seem to know what to do next.
Kael says, "Come on, kid. This way."
They walk.
I watch them go.
Kael keeps to the boy's pace. He does not crowd him.
He does not put a hand on his shoulder. He walks beside him with his hands in his pockets and he points at things — that's the garage, that's the school we built two years ago, that building over there is the infirmary, that's where Jo lives, that's the bell we ring if there's trouble.
Callum nods. He says yeah and cool and got it and once, when Kael points out the tree line and says you don't go past it without me or your mother or Conrad, my son says, yes sir, very seriously, and I see Kael's shoulders settle a notch lower in his coat.
They are gone for two hours.
When they come back, my son is laughing.
He is laughing.
I am sitting on the porch steps with a coffee that has gone cold and Della in the kitchen behind me pretending she is not also watching, and the two of them come up the path from the eastern woods with my son in front and Kael behind, and Callum is in the middle of a story — I can hear his voice from a hundred yards out — and his hands are moving and his head is thrown back and he is laughing.
He says, ". . . and then it just bit me, it bit me right on the —"
"Show me where."
"Right here, look —"
"Kid, that's a scratch."
"It's a bite."
"It's a scratch. Wait till you get bit by a real one."
"There are real ones?"
"There are real ones."
"How big."
Kael is laughing now too. Quietly. With his shoulders, more than his face.
He is laughing the way he used to laugh at my husband twenty years ago when they were both still boys and Ronan was telling him an obviously exaggerated story about a fight he claimed he had been in.
The exact same laugh. The exact same shoulders.
They reach the porch.
Callum collapses onto the steps next to me, breathing hard, grinning.
He is filthy. His jeans have mud halfway up the calves.
His hair has pine needles in it. He looks exactly like his father at his age and he looks happier than I have ever seen him and the two things together hit me in the sternum like a fist.
"Mom, you would not believe —"
"I would believe anything you tell me. Slow down."
"There was this — okay, there was this thing in the woods, this little thing, like a — what was that, Kael?"
"A pine marten."
"A pine marten, Mom, like a — like an evil tiny weasel — and it bit me —"
"It scratched you," Kael says, behind him, settling onto the porch rail with his shoulder against the post.
"It bit me, and Kael said —"
The story goes on. I am barely listening.
I am watching the man at the porch rail.
He is not looking at me. He is looking at my son with the expression of a man who has been waiting his whole life to listen to someone tell him an unimportant story and did not know it.
The wall in his face is still up, mostly, but there is — there is light coming through where it used to be solid.
There is a crack down the middle and the light is coming through and the man behind the wall is visible for the first time since I knew him.
I have to look away.
Callum finishes the story. Kael says he is going to head back to the clubhouse.
He tells Callum to drink water and rest. He tells him they will do a longer walk tomorrow.
He tells him goodnight even though it is the middle of the afternoon.
He cannot — quite — bring himself to look at me.
He nods in my general direction. He goes.
I watch his back go down the path.
Callum says, "Mom, he's the one. Isn't he."
I look at my son.
"What do you mean."
"The man who — he was the one with Dad. When Dad died."
He says it casually. I freeze.
"Who told you that."
"Nobody. I figured it out. He looks at me like he killed somebody."
My seventeen-year-old. My seventeen-year-old, sitting on a porch in West Virginia with pine needles in his hair, has figured it out in the first walk.
Of course he has. He is Ronan's son. Ronan saw through people the same way.
It is not a clever trick. It is a kind of attention, a willingness to look at the thing other people are trying to hide.
My son has it. My son has, apparently, always had it, and I have not been paying enough attention to notice.
"He's the one," I say.
"Okay."
"Callum —"
"It's okay, Mom."
"It is not okay."
"It's — I don't mean it like that. I mean — I don't have to figure it out today. He's nice. He's nice to me. We can — I can figure out the rest of it later."