*
I didn’t leave my father’s side the rest of the evening. We ate outside, on the side porch, and he let me sit right beside him, very close. The sun slipped away and the night shifted to cool. I held on to his body heat while I bolted down my food.
A screen kept the mosquitoes out, but the chirruping of crickets and call of a barn owl floated around us. We were a large group, ten people. I stayed very quiet, and I tried to take it all in. Uncle Kirby drank until his eyes turned shiny, and his laugh boomed loud and frightening. Phoebe and her mom sat on either side of him, a matched pair of wide-eyed bookends. Across the table, Anna talked to Grandpa. Dark hair fell across her face, so that I couldn’t see her lips moving. When she reached out and poured herself wine, no one said a thing. My father chatted quietly with his mother, who was seated on his left. I could hear their words, very mild ideas, thoughts about my father’s research and what he hoped to accomplish. Academic politics. That type of thing. My grandmother, who always spoke her mind, never once mentioned whatever had happened in New York. Or my mother. Or me. That left Keith and Charlie. They sat at the far end of the table. Charlie wore a dress with no sleeves. Her arms were lined with an abundance of silver bracelets. She played with them incessantly, spinning them around and around the slim bones of her wrist. Keith refused to eat. He stared at his food with his head and shoulders down. His eyes looked puffy. A portrait of sheer misery.
I finished everything on my plate. Guzzled down the glass of milk my father set in front of me.
Keith kicked his chair back and stalked from the room without a word.
“Moody one, isn’t he?” my aunt said.
“It’s the age,” her husband said knowingly.
Charlie laughed. Phoebe caught my eye, then looked away. Anna poured more wine.
“He’s become a vegetarian,” my grandfather announced as if this information might somehow be relevant.
My grandmother brought dessert in. Pound cake and blueberries. I licked whipped cream from my fingers. Belly full, I sat back in my chair. My head began to swim. My eyes began to droop.
When the moon rose halfway into the night sky and the stars twinkled, my father squeezed my shoulder.
“Let’s go,” he said.
I nodded and followed him silently up to his bedroom on the second floor, forcing my limbs to move. He closed the door and locked it. I sat on the edge of a slippery armchair. It held the greasy scent of pigskin leather. A four-poster bed sat on the other side of the room, beside a wide window of divided light that looked down onto the dark ravine. I yawned.
My father began to undress. The only light came from a bedside lamp, a cast-iron thing in the shape of a candle flame. Its glow was dim, weak.
I turned my head toward the door. The weight of the surrounding darkness flooded over me. I leaned to one side and slid from the chair onto the floor with a crash. My father knelt beside me.
“Drew?”
I couldn’t see anything. Just blackness.
He slapped my cheeks. Felt my pulse.
“Drew! Open your eyes.”
Open my eyes? I hadn’t realized they were closed. I blinked and saw my father’s floating face. His long nose and sharp angles. He scooped me up and placed me, not back in the chair, but on his bed, propped against the headboard. Slumped in his arms, I got a whiff of Scotch and sweat, very sour, and my heart raced. Why were all his clothes off? His chest was covered in fur. Like a pelt.
“Dad?”
“What?”
“Where’s Siobhan?”
“At home. With your mother. They couldn’t make it up here—”
“No! Tonight. Where’s Siobhan tonight? Is she safe?”
The creases around his eyes were like slot canyons in the desert. Deep. Impenetrable.
“Siobhan is safe. Okay? Don’t worry. Just so long as you relax.”
I nodded. The buzzing in my ears began, that soft, chemical calling. A familiar sound. A familiar exiting of my body. A familiar distortion of time and place. My mind sloshed from truth to falsehood. Soon I was not Drew. I was not me.
Soon my clothes were off, too.
Part of me didn’t know why.
But a part of me did.
My father stood and walked to the window. He stared out at the full moon. His hands pressed against the glass, long, shadowy fingers splayed like spider legs stuck in a web of leaded panes.
My head bobbed, drugged and heavy.
Don’t go to sleep. You’ll miss the wolves.
A rattling staccato broke my daze. My eyes widened. The noise originated from my father’s fingers as they quivered and rattled against the glass. The sound grew louder, rhythmic and hypnotic. The muscles in his hands tensed until his palms shook, then his arms. Then his whole body.