Little Wolves

SHARDS





Logan was already gone by the time she came downstairs the next morning, but he had left Clara a to-do list, and number one on the list was the dishes, which she hadn’t washed in a few days. He had underlined this task so she would understand how important it was, a plea for a return to normalcy. Logan detested messes, and the entire kitchen had a sour smell, the same smell on her skin. Clara tore the list into pieces that she left for him on the table and then set to making cinnamon rolls, Pillsbury, in the oven.

She ate the rolls on the living room couch and licked frosting from her fingertips. The shades were drawn against the day; outside big trucks lumbered past on the one road leading out of town, rattling the glass in the window casings. All the world on the move now, headed elsewhere. Clara sank into the cushion, a pillow propped behind her to support her back, her mind thick with sugar and dough.

The night before Logan had awakened her past midnight. “This is killing me,” he said in a drained voice.

“Logan?” His body curled under the blankets in a fetal position, so she touched his hip. “What are you talking about?”

He grumbled something more, still fast asleep she realized, talking to someone is in his dreams. Clara couldn’t be sure she’d heard him right.

She reached under the covers, found his wrist, felt the erratic wingbeats of his pulse under his skin. “What’s killing you?” she whispered, afraid of what he meant, not wanting to wake him up. She had not slept well the rest of the night and a nap was in order this morning. She shut her eyes and drifted off on the couch.

When she woke, Logan was standing over her, his brow furrowed. He must have found the to-do list she ripped into pieces. “Come eat,” he said, “I made soup.”

“I didn’t even hear you come home. Wow, I was really out of it.”

Logan didn’t say anything as they sat at the table and mumbled grace and set to the soup, which still steamed. Silence and clinking silverware. How could she be hungry again so soon? While she ate her soup, she searched her mind for the right words, something inane about the weather to break the tension.

“I wish you wouldn’t eat like that,” Logan said.

She had been enjoying her meal until then, the hot salty broth. “Like what?”

“That slurping noise. You don’t have to slurp it like a dog. Watch.” He dipped a spoon into the bowl, lifted out some soup, and put it past his pinched lips.

“Jesus Christ on a stick. Is that how you’re supposed to eat soup?”

Logan set his spoon down, his face reddening. “Don’t mock me, Clara. I just wish you wouldn’t smack your lips all the time. I wish you would chew with your mouth shut.”

Her eyes grew hot.

“Oh, don’t. Not this again.”

“Don’t what?” As if she could stop it.

“It’s been this same weepy self-pity ever since Seth shot himself. You know what, Clara? That kid was a little shit. You wouldn’t believe the stories I’ve heard. He was a terror. This whole town is glad he’s dead.”

She got up before she said something she regretted and carried the remains of her bowl into the kitchen, not wanting to look at him. She turned on the water. She didn’t mean to do it at first, but that china bowl was slick in her hands. The first one dropped with a crack into the hard stainless-steel sink and shattered into a thousand pieces. It was an accident, pure and simple. His mother’s bone china with the baby-blue etchings. That Dutch boy with his shit-eating grin and the little blue windmills. The sound of it breaking snapped something inside of her, too. One by one she lifted the dirty dishes stacked on the side and started slamming them into the sink.

Logan shouted for her to stop. She heard a clatter as his chair fell over, and then he loomed in the entryway. Clara’s vision narrowed to a single red thread. Sometime during the shattering she had picked up a shard of pottery, and she clenched it in her palm.

Logan was saying something, but she couldn’t hear a word. A roaring filled her ears. A sound like a growl from her throat. There weren’t any words in her mind anymore, just the sure knowledge that if he laid a hand on her she was going to gut him with the edge of this broken dish.

Logan approached, his palms turned up, his arms spread. More words streaming out of his mouth, like he was calling her from a long ways away. Like she was falling down and down, and he was trying to reach her. Her eyelashes blinking furiously. His form blurring. A burning in her blood.

Only a few feet away Logan paused. He was still talking, saying something over and over. The space between them disappeared. He touched her arm. She didn’t stab him. She didn’t stab him. He was saying, “Clara, it’s okay.” He was saying, “Clara you’re not in danger. No one is going to hurt you. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Then he held her in his arms. A deep shudder passed out of her, a moan. She buried her face in his shoulder and let the shard fall from her hand.

He went away again; he had to. They were expecting him for the weekly service at the nursing home. He didn’t want to go; she saw it in his eyes. A wariness. Logan was afraid of what she might do. “I shouldn’t have said any of that,” he said. He tried to smile. Big black half-moons under his eyes, like someone had been punching him while he slept. The dark thing he had been talking to in his sleep. How had she not noticed his suffering?

She wanted to tell him sorry, too, because she was, but her throat felt raw, like she had swallowed something so hot it scorched away the words. She was conscious of her bare feet on the floor. A barefoot, pregnant madwoman. She glanced to the window, wondering if the sound of breaking dishes had carried out into the neighborhood, if people had heard what was happening in the parsonage, if there were eyes upon them even now. She had come back to herself. She was safe in her kitchen, but something still bristled inside her. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure, but you shouldn’t talk to me like that. Ever.”

“Agreed.” He licked his lips. “We’re supposed to make each other better people. That’s what marriage should be. Like two ropes woven together.”

“And Seth Fallon may have been a little shit … but I can’t help feeling responsible.”

“Oh, sweetie.” He was tender now, regretful. This was the man she had married. His blue eyes clear and pristine as some far northern lake. “You can’t save somebody if they don’t want to be saved.”

“I know.” That wasn’t it, that wasn’t it at all. “You aren’t mad at me?”

Dust from broken china was somehow on his clerical shirt, and he brushed it off. “No. Tell you the truth, I hated those dishes. Who eats off china every single day? I don’t want to think about my parents every time we sit down to eat.”

“I lost it there.”

“Yeah.” He exhaled heavily. “But I understand. You’ve been through a lot.”

She had, but it didn’t excuse it. Violence, in her experience, was rarely premeditated. Clara remembered the first time her former fiancé Gregory had struck her. He was a coworker from the bank where she had been a teller, and it happened after a long day at work. They were sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor of his apartment, eating slices of take-out pepperoni pizza from a cardboard box set between them. They had not been arguing, nor could Clara even recall what they were talking about. The pizza grease was wet on her lips when Gregory got on his knees, almost like he was going to ask her to move in with him. The hope lit in her. They had been engaged for nearly a year, and Gregory was good to her, an attentive lover, a man only a few years older who was both cultured and successful. They hadn’t set a date, and Gregory put it off when she tried bringing it up. Clara remembered dabbing at her mouth with a napkin, tilting her chin, when his fist cracked her in the jaw.

She remembered how her mouth filled with blood, how she lay stunned and gasping for breath for only a moment, and then he was pulling her toward him, begging forgiveness, saying “I don’t know what came over me” as he tried wrap her in a smothering embrace. Frightened, Clara had kicked him, her heel striking him in the ribs, and scrambled away on her knees. She only got a few feet before he grabbed her by the ankle, and when she fell she knocked over the lamp stand and everything on it, the bulb bursting, imploding really, his set of keys jingling when they struck the hardwood floor. He had her by the ankle, his words harder now, and he was pulling her toward his bedroom. Clara grabbed the keys and threaded them through her knuckles, like metal claws. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I didn’t mean to do it.” She curled into herself, playing wounded, but when he leaned down near her, Clara punched him with the sharp keys in her fist. The blow ripped skin from his cheek, and he screamed and reeled away. She had run out of the apartment, right through the broken bulb’s glass, in her bare feet, and then walked all the way home, constantly looking behind her, sure that he was going to come punish her for fighting back.

The faucet was still running, so Clara reached among the shards to shut it off, her thoughts jumbled as something struggled to stand up inside her on newborn foal legs. She walked over to Logan and adjusted the tongue of white plastic, which had gone crooked in his black collar. She concentrated to keep her hands from shaking. “There, you can go now,” she said, because she couldn’t think right with him so close. “I’ll clean this up.”

He touched her face. He swallowed, tried to find his words.

“Go,” she said. “The old fogies are waiting for you.”

CLARA DIDN’T CLEAN up the dishes right away, despite what she had promised Logan. Downstairs the kittens cried out to her. They had heard the uproar and must have been upset. On the stove she heated up milk in a saucepan. This she poured into a collection of medicine droppers for the kittens before trudging down to the basement.

Even in the heat of early autumn the basement remained a cold, whispery place. Stairs painted red, a lipstick smear. Whitewash splashed on the walls to keep down mold, green copper pipes dripping, and the darkness at the bottom yawning like a mouth. There was no rail, so she braced herself against the wall every time she went down, one hand holding the medicine droppers, the other her belly.

The kittens waited, ravenous. They needed their mother. Clara understood. The kittens’ mother, the cat she’d named Sorena, spent most of her time outdoors hunting gophers in the cemetery or sunning herself below the neighbor’s bird feeder. She did not waste time on feeding her babies. She knew winter was coming, and her babies were too small. They would have been dead if Clara hadn’t prepared a box for them, made a nest from torn newspapers, and moved it behind the old oil furnace where sunlight trickled in through a greasy window. Clara knew next to nothing about raising baby animals but was determined to keep them alive. And all that effort, what was it for? Logan was going to take them to some farm, where they’d surely die, though several days had passed, and he had not loaded them up to take them to the Nelsons.

This was the same window where she’d looked out and seen Seth’s shoes, the ragged hem of his coat. That day she had felt a hand on her shoulder when she saw him. Icy breath on her neck. A voice inside her head. Don’t answer the door. Stay with me. The baby inside her going still. A quiet, commanding voice. What Clara had always imagined her mother sounding like.

She picked up the kittens and held them against her, drizzling milk into their pink gums. “I’m sorry,” she told each one as she lifted it out. “But you can’t stay here anymore.” The kittens fought to reach her, and she had to lift them by the hackles to keep from getting clawed, though they were small enough to fit within the palm of her hand. The whole milk from the grocery didn’t seem to be providing enough nutrition. She needed to find the Nelson family in the church directory. You weren’t supposed to take kittens from the mother until they were at least six weeks old, and Clara was sure Sorena would run away. And yet so far something had kept the cat here. As she fed the kittens she hummed a tuneless nursery rhyme to drown out their mewling.

Then the doorbell rang, silencing her song. The shock of the sound seemed to carry through the wires of the old parsonage because the bulb above her died with a fizzing pop.

She stood uncertainly as darkness washed over her. The blood throbbed in the ends of her missing fingers. That old ache come back again.

The dark was not complete. Sour gray light leaked in from the window. The bell rang again. She still hadn’t moved, waiting for her eyes to adjust. All she had to do was walk over to the window, but she was afraid of what she might see: those dirty shoes, the fraying edge of a coat. The figure she had seen at the edge of the corn. The bell rang and rang.

Silence. She felt her senses shutting down, narrowing, the way they had with Logan in the kitchen. This was the moment her body had been preparing her for. Down in the basement she had no weapon, no place to hide. Adrenaline pumped uselessly under her skin.

There was something down here with her. She sensed it standing right behind her. It had come inside. A tremor traveled from her bare feet to the top of her skull, and then she was shivering all over. Don’t turn around. Don’t move. This is how you survive.

Help me, Clara. Please.

The hair prickled on her neck.

That was it, a voice, her name, a cry, before the doorbell stopped and the sense went away.

She waited a minute, catching her breath. The kittens started mewling again, unsatisfied with the little milk she had carried down for them. Then the lightbulb fizzed to life. She turned around, half blinded, but all she made out was a shadow retreating into the watery darkness where she intended to set up a darkroom for her photography. The sound of her name echoed in her ears. She had known that voice, a boy’s voice, scared. Seth.

The doorbell rang again, breaking her chain of thought. She wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there. Then from above came the sound of the doorknob turning, the squeak of hinges. My God. Someone had come right inside the house; she heard footsteps in the kitchen.

“Clara?” A voice rattling in the empty room above. An old woman’s voice.

She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she let it out in a rush. Instead of fear the feeling that coursed through her this time was bright, hot anger. It was just an ordinary parishioner upstairs. If they couldn’t find Logan at the church, the first thing parishioners did was call or look in here. Because the parsonage belonged to the church, some walked right inside.

“Hello?” the voice called out once more. “Anyone home?” More footsteps, and then she must have spotted the dishes on the floor. “Goodness …”

When her breath came back, she shouted up the stairs. “You can’t just come in here. I don’t know who you think you are, but you can’t just barge into a person’s home.”

“Sorry,” said the voice. “I’ll just be leaving then.”

“You wait right there,” Clara called out. She needed to put an end to this nonsense, make sure these people understood how she needed space and privacy. There were boundaries that must be respected. That was the word Logan always used. Clara walked upstairs to find her neighbor, Nora Winters, in her kitchen, standing by the stove. Nora was a gnome-sized woman with a round face that scrunched up into a mass of wrinkles when she laughed; she had blue hair, a dye job gone wrong. She was breathing heavily just from carrying a heavy silver container across the lawn that separated the two houses.

“Hello, Clara,” she said. “I brought you something.”

Clara drew in her breath. She was mortified to be found in her kitchen in the late afternoon still wearing her robe, not to mention the broken china in the sink. If Nora breathed a word of this to anyone it would spread all over town. “You can’t just come in here,” Clara repeated, but the heat had gone out of her voice.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “I was just going to leave it on the counter with a note. It’s hotdish. Tater Tot hotdish. My specialty. I keep one stored in the freezers for funerals and such.”

Clara felt tired, so very tired. “No thanks.” The thought of soggy Tots soaking in gravy and beef left her queasy.

“But you have to eat for two,” Nora rushed on, her lips pursing. “You’re far too skinny. Roundness is the natural shape the Lord intended for things. The earth is round and the harvest moon over the corn.”

Clara had heard this lecture from her before. “I’m hardly skinny,” she said. “I’m fit to burst.” Fit to burst? Why was she talking this way? Why hadn’t she given the old bag the boot? Nora was one of those women who once lived on a family farm. A cheery, rotund woman who caused everything to bloom around her. It was as though, being round herself, she caused everything to plump and share that shape. And though her husband, she assured Clara on one occasion, had died of a massive heart attack due to clogged arteries, he went to his grave fat and satisfied.

“Why, let that prairie wind take hold of you and you’ll be tossed about like a weed,” she said.

Clara surprised herself by laughing and then caught sight of the mess in the sink again. Nora’s gaze followed hers. “It’s my fault. I have a terrible temper and was tired of looking at all those dishes.”

“Well, let me help you clean it up,” Nora said. “When I was pregnant sometimes the most rotten moods came over me.”

Clara looked at Nora, her blue hair, her face ruddy from the short walk, that cheerful voice.

“It’s true,” Nora said, reading the doubt in Clara’s eyes. “I once took a bat to my husband’s pickup after he went to the bar and left me alone with the kids on a Saturday night. Got both headlights before he stopped me.” Against her wishes, Clara felt herself smiling again as she imagined this turnip of a woman attacking her husband’s truck. “So you just let me clean this up. It’s one thing these old bones is good for.”

“No. I have to …”

Before she knew it, Nora had crossed the distance and put her hand on Clara’s. Her voice lowered. “Why don’t you go upstairs and run yourself a nice, hot bath? You leave this to me.” She squeezed Clara’s hand, gently insistent. “And don’t you worry about talk spreading uptown. I can keep a secret.”

Clara’s throat thickened, and she didn’t want to cry in front of her so she nodded and did as Nora asked. She was almost out of sight before Nora spoke again, an afterthought. “Why did Steve Krieger come by to visit?”

“Who?”

“Steve, the sheriff.”

The doorbell she had heard earlier when she was in the basement with the kittens.

“Don’t know,” she said quickly. “I didn’t get to the door in time. Maybe he was looking for Logan. Will Gunderson’s funeral is a couple of days from now.”

“Oh. He’s a vigilant one, our law enforcement officer. Neither he nor Will Gunderson are the type of people you would ever want to cross.” She shook her head. “Not that you need to worry about that.”

THE BATH PROVED EVERY bit as restorative as Nora had promised. Clara put on her terry-cloth robe, a towel wrapping her hair, and went to the window. Nora was already heading home. She thought of how kind the woman had been to her on first coming here, how eager she was for the baby, telling Clara how she’d raised eight children into the fullness of adulthood and could salve, rub Vicks Vapo, or chicken soup her way through the most dire illness. But oh! There was one lost one, a boy she could not save from childhood leukemia. She thought about him every living day.

Nora went directly to her garden and knelt on rickety knees in the grass. In the center of the vegetables, now husked brown and raked over, there stood a short statue of the Virgin Mary left there by her husband, Charlie. Nora and Charlie shared one of those marriages, Catholic and Lutheran, which caused so much woe on either side of their families. Nora had told Clara all about it, her voice so loud during the church social hour that people at other tables turned to listen. “ ‘It’s all the same to me,’ Charlie used to say. ‘To get to New Ulm you can take Highway Twenty-Nine or you can take the Fourteen. They both end up in the same damn place.’ ”

It had been Nora’s husband, Charlie, who insisted the statue be placed in the middle of the green growing things. Nora told her she had resisted at first, but the statue grew on her. In the statue’s arms she took some comfort. Here was a woman given a sacred task, bearing God’s child into a world that would mock him and impale him on a tree. She did not break when that man was spat upon and crucified. Her love had been absolute. The resurrected Christ came back to women first.