Kiss of the Wolf (11 page)

J
OANIE

The happiest I've ever been was in fourth or fifth grade. The sisters were always looking out for you, always believed in what you could do. I placed high on an achievement test and instead of moving me up a grade, which I didn't want, they tutored me on my own when things were too easy. That was on their own time. They brought books in extra, and when I finished them, they'd just feed the shelves. I'd do my exercises and then go over and pick out something and sit quietly while everyone caught up. I read most of Dickens that way, and a lot about the Maryknoll missionaries.

They also got me a little encyclopedia I could keep in my desk. I worked my way through it,
A
to
Z
.

They thought I was artistic, so they let me design the bulletin boards. That was a big thing, because the bulletin boards went all the way around the room on top of the blackboards. I had to keep to the basic theme, but other than that I could do anything. In December, we had Advent; in May, something blue with the Blessed Mother in it. In June, the Sacred Heart. They were so nice to me, when I think about it. I'd go to a separate room during subjects I was way ahead in and sit there by myself, drawing pictures and cutting and pasting colored paper.

I won seven straight spelling bees. I was the girls' champion. It was always arranged boys against girls, and the girls would root hard for me. You could see even then that we figured we didn't win many things, so it was good to win those.

I still have the crucifix I got from the seventh one over my old bed at my mother's house. The cross is that fake marble: white with blue swirled through it. The Jesus on it is gold.

Because I was advanced, I was big in the festivals. I loved the Feast of the Blessed Virgin: we all dressed in our white dresses and got to carry flowers. Three or four of us had special parts to say for the congregation. Mine was always “Mary, intercede for us”—three years in a row, “Mary, intercede for us.”

I think they connected schoolwork with spiritual grace. If you were advanced in one, you were advanced in the other.

They used milk bottles in the catechism books to illustrate the various states of grace, like our souls were little refrigerators. Mortal sins looked like bottles of chocolate milk. Saints would have, like, cases of regular milk. I remember I imagined venial sins as pints.

I imagined our souls like white bedsheets instead, with chocolate milk spilled on them. And I remembered my mother saying that after you washed something so many times, it never got so white again.

But making a good confession: you walked out of that church with such a lightness, such a beautiful feeling.

As I got older I got along better with the priests, because I was a wiseass and I was not demure. There were priests who'd like you for that, but the sisters usually didn't.

I'm sorry, now, I didn't get along better with the sisters.

The Monteleones follow me around the house. At night, when I close my eyes, I see the road and Tommy coming out of nowhere.

It's like Nancy asked me once, when she was sleeping with a guy she didn't like, “How'd I end up here? At what point did I end up here?”

I blame Gary. If he hadn't left us, I wouldn't've been driving. It's not fair, but neither is what happened to me. Lying there in the dark, I think all this should be dumped on him. But then I remind myself that he didn't kill anyone and I did.

In every possible situation, now—just standing around, while other people talk—I worry about giving myself away. Behind everything, there's this other life.

This morning I sat on the floor in the kitchen before Todd got up and thought, Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Hypocrite.

And then at other times—I can already feel it—the guilt goes away. That simple. And I can feel myself living with it the way people learn to live with not being taller, not being more beautiful.

In bed at night I say to myself, I'm not like this. I'm the same as always inside. And that's not true.

So I tell myself, You've got to tell somebody. You've got to go to the police. Tomorrow—tomorrow you'll go to the police.

And then I think about Todd upstairs and think, Will he go to the police?

And I remember the way he looks now when I do something for him: the way the dog looks off to one side when you put her food down, like she's not going to be swayed that easily by something like that.

T
ODD

I called the police three different times in the last two days and I haven't stayed on the phone yet. The guy answers and I hang up. The phone's busy and I hang up. The phone's ringing and I hang up.

I called Information in Seattle, Tacoma, and Sacramento, trying to find my father. They found a G. Muhlenberg in Tacoma, but no Muhlberg. I called it anyway.

The guy who answered told me there was no Gary Muhlberg in a three-hundred-mile radius. I musta woke him up.

I called Father Cleary back. I figured I could stay anonymous. Then, when he answered, I hung up, because I figured I couldn't.

I called another parish. I called St. Ambrose in Bridgeport. The woman at the rectory told me that their Father didn't have phone-in hours, and I said what if it was a spiritual emergency, and she said I could come in. I said I couldn't come in, because I was a handicapped guy and the motor on my wheelchair was broken. She said Father could come out to me, what was my address. I told her I lived in another parish. She asked why I didn't go to the priest in my parish. I hung up.

My mother had no idea I made these calls.

I gave up calling. I couldn't think of anyone else to call. I couldn't think of a single other person to call. There was a radio advice guy, but that was long distance and would cost money and my mother would see the bill. There was no one to talk to. I felt like putting a note in a bottle and dropping it out my window. I started writing letters to my dad.

Then I scratched that out, too. It sounded too desperate. Maybe that was why he left us, because we needed him so much.

I ended up staying up all night. At about two, I snuck downstairs and watched cable. I watched for about an hour. The TV screen was the only light in the house.

Then I thought there might be something about where my father went after Colorado upstairs in all his stuff in the attic. After he left, my mother and my grandmother piled everything of his that didn't get thrown out into a big chest with a lid in the attic. So I went up there.

I didn't even know what I was looking for. A map with a dotted line going from Colorado to some other place? A card from a friend of his saying, If you ever leave your family, come stay with me? Even not knowing what I was looking for, it's amazing how little I found. A bunch of letters he wrote to my mother a thousand years ago. They were wrapped together with electrical tape! I had the feeling she wasn't planning on reading them again anytime soon.

Also a photo of him at the beach. I don't think I was even born yet.

Also at the bottom of the trunk, in a little flat box like you keep Christmas cards in, a satin book that said
OUR WEDDING
.

I spent the rest of the time I was up there just looking through that. It got light out in the little crappy window covered with cobwebs over the stairs. I found photos of the reception, photos of everyone getting ready. My father looking jokey with two other guys, and a flat metal bottle in his pocket. I found their wedding ceremony they wrote for themselves. With the priest, I guess. Some of the prayers and stuff they didn't write. The rest of the time I was up there, I read along in their ceremony, trying to figure out which words were my father's.

Of course she was going to the funeral. She barely knew the family, saw the deceased twice a year, if that: of course she was going to the funeral.

She'd talked her mother out of picking her up. She was going; that was enough. This way she could come and go on her own, and her parents could stay afterward as long as they wanted.

Todd was staying home. He didn't need to go through that, and not all the kids were going. The official story was that he had a fever.

She'd been up the whole night before. She felt like she was dreaming on her feet. When it got light, she made a pot of coffee, six cups, and drank it all. It didn't seem to have an effect. She stood in front of the mirror at 7:00
A
.
M
., putting on makeup. She tried to work up a little determination. This was her day to become presentable. To look alive. To start to take control of her life. Her eyes seemed half closed.

She put down her blush applicator. She ran her hands through her hair and pulled it back so tight she Chinesed her eyes.

Todd was snoring upstairs in his bedroom. She wiped her hands on her robe, and long hairs spiraled and floated to the floor. She left everything where it was and went up to check on him.

He was across his bed sideways, his feet and arms hanging off. It was already warm, but she pulled the sheet a little more over him. He turned in his sleep and said in a kind of delirium, “It was Wednesday.”

She looked around the room. He'd taken his posters down. Pieces of Scotch tape spotted the walls. There was a framed magazine photo of a Minnesota Viking, but that was it. The clean clothes she hadn't folded were in one pile and his dirty clothes were in another. The piles overlapped. There was a map of the western United States taped to the wall by the phone. Colored pins were stuck in various cities. Whether they represented places he thought his father might be or had been, she didn't know.

She went back downstairs and waited for more energy, or for time to pass. She felt thwarted and useless in her own house. She let the dog out.

She must've fallen asleep, or at least into some kind of daze. Hearing the upstairs shower brought her out of it, and she shook off the grogginess by making another, smaller pot of coffee, decaf for Todd. The phone rang.

It was Bruno. He wanted to know if she wanted a ride to the funeral.

She rubbed her eyes for a while before answering. “I don't,” she said. “I want to be able to leave early.”

“So do I,” he said. “You think I wanna hang around there all day?”

The line was silent. She understood he was waiting her out.

“C'mon,” he said. “We can cheer each other up. You're ready to go, we're outta there.”

She leaned against the wall, wedging the receiver between her ear and the plaster. “All right,” she said. “I won't be ready till the last minute.”

While she spoke she wrote notes to herself on the
TO DO
pad stuck to the refrigerator:

“Be over in a hour,” Bruno said. He got off.

Despite the half-makeup job, she thought she'd better shower. Todd was finished and thumping around his room. She took a shower. He'd gotten water everywhere. When she got out, feeling a little better, he was in the kitchen, buttering a bagel. She sat at the kitchen table, her hair still wet, and combed it out. He brought over the two bagel halves and gave her the bottom. Recently he'd started keeping the best part of the food they shared for himself, as if life without his father made him selfish.

He put marmalade on his half. His face was closed off and concentrating, as if he was counting to himself.

She pulled at a knot in her hair. She had a headache. She thought, Is this what it's going to be like from here on in?

“Do you know where Dad might be now?” he said. His lips were chapped and his wet hair looked like a modified punk haircut.

“You mean what city?” she asked.

“Where he is, what city,” he said. She could hear the weariness in his voice.

“I know as much as you,” she said. “Last I heard, he was heading somewhere in Washington. He never said what city.”

Todd tore off some bagel and chewed while squinting at the kitchen window. It was gray out.

“No guarantee he ever got to Washington,” she said.

A sports merchandising catalogue was on the floor under the window, swollen and frilled from having been rained on. She could see the circled Minnesota Viking helmet from there.

“You thinking of telling him about what happened?” she asked.

He shrugged.

She got up and went into the downstairs bathroom. While she dried her hair and put on makeup, she tried to think of what to say.

When she came out, he was gone.

She put the dishes in the sink. She got dressed.

She heard him in the living room. She stood on one leg, wrestling with the heel of one of her flats, and peeked in.

He sat on the sofa, bending a spoon into odd shapes. He had the TV on. She couldn't tell what he was watching. It looked like a nature show on rodents. Brown things (beavers? woodchucks?) were rooting around a riverbank.

“You gonna be all right?” she asked. It sounded like she meant, You gonna tell? She felt, suddenly, like an old guard at a tired museum.

“Yeah,” he said. He didn't look up. He had the spoon in an S shape.

She heard Bruno's car in the driveway. She said she'd be back soon and headed out the door. It looked like rain. She grabbed a folding umbrella leaning against the wall near the dog's dish.

The dog was sitting there when she opened the door.

“How long was Sewer Mouth out?” Bruno called, getting out of his car. He'd pulled up on the grass next to the garage instead of parking in the driveway. “All night, I hope?”

“I just let her out,” Joanie said. She moved aside to let the dog through and then shut the door behind her.