Chapter Fourteen
Our last stop of the day is supposed to be at the baseball diamond, taking shots of us playing “vampire baseball” and generally making idiots of ourselves, but James has other plans.
“I called in a favor,” he says when I ask for the hundredth time where we’re going. “Trust me on this one.”
I’m consulting my notebook full of the posting schedule.
“Not to sound too uptight or anything, but this was going to be one of the last posts from us before we hand off the socials. I was counting on this being a big hitter, no pun intended.”
James winces.
“Intended or not, we could do without the sports metaphors, Green.”
“Okay, Neely, ” I say, “but I really need to know what you’re thinking, because if it’s not going to produce at least a pair of minute-long videos and five decent photos, we need to get to the baseball diamond.”
“Oh, you’ll get your videos,” James says. “I swear it.”
“Swear on what? How do I know this is a real swear and not just a phrase you’re saying to try to distract me from the fact that you would rather do literally anything else than touch a baseball bat?”
James leans over and flips my notebook closed, not once taking his eyes off the road.
“You’re not wrong about that,” he says. “But I swear on our one day that this will be better for views.”
“ Oh, ” I say. “So this is the part where you finally throw me off a cliff to my death for views. Got it.”
“Not off a cliff,” James says, his lips quirking. “But maybe to the wolves.”
—
If James’s rental house grew out of the forest, then the building before us was hewn from a quarry of stone.
It looks more like an upscale doctor’s office building than a wolf sanctuary, particularly because—as James pointed out on the drive in—the enclosures are near the back of the property to decrease exposure to road-noise sound pollution. From here in the parking lot, I can’t see a single fence.
“They’ve got foxes and coyotes, too,” James says as he shuts my car door.
“And the foxes in particular can be sensitive when it comes to sounds, so they’ve done their best to offset that in their planning.
” He raises our joined hands—he grabbed mine the moment I emerged from the car—to gesture at the building.
“The main station was recently remodeled to add office space and a volunteer training center. There are plans to improve the visitor center”—he points to a smaller building tucked in a grove of aspens behind the station—“but that’s not until next year. ”
My camera bag bounces against my hip, reminding me that this is supposed to be a work venture, not solely a personal one, but I can’t help but ask.
“You know this place,” I say. “How?”
“My mom,” he says. “This was kind of her thing, and she made it my thing by association.”
“Wait…your mom is from Tatum?” I ask. “Are you ?”
“Not at all,” James says. “She just lived here for her last few years. She said she wanted to paint the mountains. And wolves. Mom was all about the werewolves in The Meadow. In exchange for painting time, she volunteered here when her energy was good. Even though she was off chemo in the end, she was…tired.”
“She’d be so disappointed you chose to play for William’s team,” I tease.
James rolls his eyes.
“She’d be more disappointed that I haven’t visited here in over a year. She came here all the time in the end. Not to paint, but just to sit with them. Dragged me here when I came to visit, too. Fair warning, I’m likely to get an earful from—”
“ There you are, ” a voice says, and The Great James Neely’s response to hearing it is to roll his shoulders forward like he’s trying to make himself smaller. He’s cowed by this voice, and I’m already prepared to pledge my undying loyalty to its owner when she rounds the building toward us.
She’s a short, stout woman with bright-blond hair swirled with strands of gray that catch the setting sun.
Her no-nonsense pants and slick boots are splattered with mud, and her face is set in an expression that appears grumpy on the surface, but there’s too much of a twinkle in her eye to take it seriously.
She looks grandma age, maybe even great-grandma age, but her sure and confident gait and the liveliness of her expression might as well belong to a teenager.
“Oh, don’t shrink away from me, boy,” she says, walking up to James and dropping a pail of something that smells terribly foul to bring him into a back-thumping hug.
“Let me look at you. Too famous to come and give your ol’ Andy a hug every once in a while, eh?
Well, my heart may mend, but you know whose won’t. ”
James rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t break away from the hug even though it appears he is bent in half and it can’t be comfortable.
“Cassio has yet to hold a grudge, Miranda,” he says into her shoulder. “And I’m not too famous. Just too busy.”
“And who is this you have with you?” She releases James to give me a playfully suspicious once-over, but any pretense of malice is again ruined by the way she can keep the smile from her lips but not her eyes.
“Never brought a girl here, this one,” she tells me.
“Practically begged him to bring that Louisa Newman Schmidt girl to boost our winter visitor numbers, but he refused.”
“This is Juniper,” James says, ignoring the rest. “Which you would know if you had been paying any attention when I called you this morning.”
“I’d like to see you string more than two thoughts together with Brutus screaming for his breakfast directly in your ear,” Miranda tells him. “Come on, then. Let’s get you two some boots and you can go make your apologies to Cassio.”
I’m hesitant when Miranda leads us to the gate of a pen, but James puts his hand low on my back and doesn’t move it, even when a large—make that very large, are wolves really this big?—wolf lopes right toward us.
He stops just a few feet from us, cocking his head in a way that screams Someday I will evolve into a clueless golden retriever, and then bounds forward with his tongue lolling in between the gleeful barks as he prances around our feet.
“Hello, old friend.” James laughs. His boots squeak when he lowers into a crouch. “Ms. Miranda says you’re put out with me. Are you?”
The wolf—not a dog, not a dog—whines pathetically.
“Told you,” Miranda says from outside the pen. “I’ll leave you two to it. I’ve got meds to dispense.”
“We’ll say goodbye before we leave,” James says. Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what he says. It’s hard to make out over Cassio’s noises and the way James keeps trying and failing to stifle his laughter at Cassio’s enthusiasm.
With Miranda gone, I feel less self-conscious. The James-Cassio reunion is still in full swing, so I think it’s safe to kneel a bit away, positioning my knee in a solid patch of grass rather than the muddy soup surrounding it.
Cassio’s head turns with eerie swiftness, reminding me that for all his domesticated energy, he—like James’s rental house—is only half tame. The other half will always, I guess, yearn for the wilds of the forests.
There’s the smallest flicker of fear when he takes his paws from James’s shoulders to leap toward me, but it’s gone the moment he licks my cheek, any fright replaced by…
“Um, Cassio?” I say. “No offense, but your breath smells bad. ”
“He just ate,” James says. “Today was a fresh-meat day.”
“Delightful,” I say, but then I decide I will never speak again because Cassio’s tongue touches mine.
When Cassio calms down enough to roam around his pen with us, James walks with his hands in his pockets, casual and at ease. I forget we’re in an enclosure after a while, because we’ve walked so long in one direction without a fence in sight.
“So how did Cassio become your personal bestie?” I ask.
Cassio hears me say his name and bounds over to my side, licking my hand and panting happily.
James shakes his head at the wolf and says, “Bought him off a guy who had no business owning exotics,” he said.
“He thought he had a hybrid coyote pup, but I knew enough from my visits here to know Cassio wasn’t that when he showed me a picture at the stage door.
I wasn’t sure he was full-blooded wolf, either, but lo and behold… ”
“So a rando waited for you to…what? Sign his playbill and then said, Look at my pet doglike thing ?”
“It was for a play that had a prop baby cheetah in one scene, and the man asked if our director would rather use a real cheetah because he had ‘connections.’ I think he was more interested in showing off his own collection, to be honest, which only included Cassio and a parrot at the time. I convinced him that I would donate to his ‘cause’ if he would in turn ‘donate’ Cassio to the sanctuary, and the rest is history.” James’s mouth tilts up.
“Mom would have been thrilled if she was still around.”
Cassio, oblivious to said history, sniffs around a pine tree with great focus. He doesn’t notice, either, when I reach over to take James’s hand, telling myself over and over again to be brave, to seize the day because it’s the one day.
“And your dad?” I ask. “Was he thrilled?”
James’s hand tenses in mine and then immediately loosens.
“We have an understanding. Always have. It’s not so different from a contract, really: He’s my father.
I’m his son. I think the only thing we had in common besides blood was that we both loved my mother.
Albeit in very different ways.” James sighs.
“Mom moved out the day after my high school graduation. She said it was to spare my father the sorrow of watching the cancer take her, but I wonder—and I know he does, too—if it wasn’t more that she wanted to finally be alone. ”
“Why didn’t they divorce?” I ask.
“They couldn’t,” James says. “Well, I suppose they could have, but it just wasn’t an option for them. I doubt either of them considered it. They were…they were properly in love once, and I think even though that love changed and mellowed and…”