For someone who craved a pack, the family tableau unfolding inside the tent was riveting but bittersweet. Looking in through the screen door of the dome tent, I could tell that Mr. and Mrs. Carr were unwilling to take their hands off their little girl, who had already warmed enough within their family huddle that her trauma was receding into the distance. The three curled together on top of an air mattress, intertwined in each other’s limbs, and the contact had made the mother’s drawn face relax and the father’s smile lines spring back to life. The same curiosity that had pulled Melony into the woods that afternoon was in evidence as well. As the toddler reached up toward the swaying lantern, her mother tangled the girl’s hands in her own, bypassing the child’s urge to leap out of bed and explore.
I could hear the murmur of loving voices, but I was just far enough away that the words themselves were a muddle of syllables, much like the patter that had flowed out of Melony’s mouth as I carried her back to the campsite. The babble of sound was familiar, though, since on many days, I felt like everyone around me was speaking another language, like it was all baby talk on the verge of being understandable. Even in daylight, when I showed up at my job, smiled at Maddie, deflected Fred’s flirting, I knew I was an outsider looking in. Later, I would go home to a dark cabin and thaw out the soup I’d obsessively stewed on my day off and then frozen in meal-size portions. Two cups of soup for one person, the same day after day. I’d imagine adopting a cat or drinking myself into oblivion, but would reject both avenues of escape as too dangerous. At last I’d crawl into bed with a book and would read myself to sleep.
My life hadn’t always been so lonely. When I was Melony’s age, I’d felt the same cocoon of love that the Carr’s little girl was now enjoying, but mine had been magnified by ten due to the tribalism of a werewolf pack. Haven was a small village by human standards, but was just right for an extended werewolf family made up of a few dozen offspring and relatives of my great-grandfather, the pack founder. If I had crawled out of my parents’ home at Melony’s age, not only would my cousins’ keen noses have found me in short order, someone would likely have picked me up and taken me home with them before I could walk more than a few steps away from my parents’ front door. I’d be returned, full of milk and cookies, a few hours later, once my mother had finished whatever task took her watchful eyes away from her baby. No searchers would ever have been forced to frantically stumble through the trees looking for my freezing form because the entire pack was always keeping an eye on its younger members.
With that memory so vivid, and the family in front of me so pack-like, it was hard to remind myself why I’d voluntarily left such a paradise. But as I watched the Carrs, I knew that my corner of Haven had lacked the supportive love that made this family’s bond so strong. Instead, the same village that had felt like a protective cocoon when I was two years old quickly morphed into a restrictive wet blanket by the time I reached my teen years. Before I reached my majority, it had become clear that Haven was no haven for me.
There were many factors that made my later childhood problematic, but in the end, I fled our pack’s village to escape my father. My mother’s death, the absence of my older sister’s buffering presence, and the pregnant stepmother who soon moved into our home shook up my world, but my father could have pieced the remnants back together into a family if he’d tried. Instead, the Chief retreated into his role as pack leader and only took notice of me to make the occasional paternal decree, which always seemed to fall on the morning of my birthday.
The first pronouncement came on the day I turned twelve, when I clattered down the stairs from my attic room and found my father waiting at the bottom. “You can’t run around like a wild wolf pup anymore,” Father told me coldly, taking in my unbrushed hair and bare feet. I had planned to sneak out into the woods to see if the hummingbird I’d been watching the day before had finished building her nest, and although I hadn’t really expected a cake and streamers upon my return, a simple “Happy birthday” would have been nice. Instead, I got the world’s most painful lecture about how I would soon be changing into wolf form for the first time and needed to start learning my place within the pack. According to my father, learning my place seemed to equate to spending every spare minute helping my stepmother Cricket in the kitchen, making up for the absence of my older sister Brooke, who had fled the family home just months before.