Alice Hoffman - Second Nature

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Second Nature
by
Alice Hofman
Berkley Pub Group;
ISBN: 0425146812
Copyright 1995
Nature never deceives us, it is always we who deceive ourselves.
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
BY APRIL most people had already forgotten about him, except for some of
the nurses on the floor, who crossed themselves when they walked past
his room. The guard stationed outside his door, who had little to do
but read magazines and drink coffee for more than three months, bragged
to his friends that on nights when there was a full moon he needed a
whip and a chair just to set a dinner tray on the other side of the
door. But in fact, the guard had never even dared to look around the
room, where the metal bed was made up with clean white sheets every
week, though it had not once been slept in.
The man who occupied the room had no name. He refused to look anyone in
the eye or, even after months of work with the speech therapists, to
make any sound whatsoever, at least not in the presence of others.
Officially he was listed as patient 3119, but among themselves the staff
called him the Wolf Man, although they were expressly forbidden to do
so. He was underweight and had a long scar along the inside of one
thigh that had healed years before but still turned purple on cold or
rainy days. For two months he'd needed to wear a cast on his
reconstructed foot, otherwise he was in surprisingly good health.
Since he had no birthday, the staff at Kelvin Medical Center had
assigned him one. They'd chipped in to buy him a sweater, blue wool, on
sale at Bloomingdale's, and one of the cooks had baked and frosted an
angel food cake. But that was back in January, after he learned to use
a fork and dress himself, and they'd still had hope for him. Now, they
left him alone, and when he sat motionless, and sunlight came through
the bars on his window, some of the nurses swore that his eyes turned
yellow.
The evening before his transfer upstate, the barber was sent to his
room. There would be no need to sweep the floor after his shave and
haircut, the raven that had been perching on the window ledge was
waiting to dart through the bars and gather up the hair to wind into its
nest. One lab technician, who had been brave enough to look through the
glass window in the door, had once seen the raven eating right out of
his plate while the Wolf Man calmly continued with his dinner. Now, the
raven watched as the attendants strapped the Wolf Man into a metal chair
and held his head back. The barber wanted no chances taken, a human
bite was the most dangerous of all. In the interest of speed, he used a
razor rather than scissors, and while he worked he quickly recited a
blessing.
The following morning, two attendants helped the Wolf Man into a black
overcoat, which would be taken away once he settled into the State
Hospital, since he'd never need it again and another patient could make
use of it. The cook who had baked the angel food cake for his birthday
wept. She insisted he had smiled when she lit the candles on the cake,
but no one believed her, except the guard stationed at his door, who had
been made so anxious by this bit of news that he took to biting his
fingernails, close enough to the skin to draw blood.
The cook had discovered that the Wolf Man would not eat meat unless it
was raw. He liked his potatoes unbaked as well, and would not touch a
salad or a pudding. For his last meal, an early breakfast, she had
simply passed a hamburger patty over a flame for a moment. So what if
uncooked meat was bad for you, and most of the patients liked cereal and
toast, she wanted him to have what he liked. She had an impulse to hide
a knife or a screwdriver inside the folded napkin, because she knew that
as soon as he'd eaten his breakfast, he would be handcuffed, then
released into the custody of a social worker from the State Hospital for
the ride along the Hudson. By afternoon he would be signed into a ward
from which no one was ever released. But she didn't follow her impulse,
and after the Wolf Man had his meal, the attendants dressed him and
helped him into the black overcoat, then clasped the handcuffs on him,
quickly, from behind, before he could fight back.
Outside the door, the guard turned his Walkman up to the highest volume,
and he slipped his sunglasses on, though the April sky threatened to
storm. His friends liked to hear stories about the Wolf Man--how he
crouched and circled three times before he curled up to sleep with his
back against the wall, that five strong men were needed to hold him down
each time they drew blood or inoculated him against measles and
tetanus--and the guard was always happy to oblige. But what he never
mentioned, as he drank cold beer with his friends, was that on nights
when there was thunder he often heard a whimpering behind the door, a
sound so pitiful it turned his bones cold and his heart inside out.
That was the sound the trappers had heard on the last day of December,
when the snow was ten feet deep and deer stuck in the drifts and froze
solid. There, at the edge of northern Michigan, much of the land had
never been charted and trees were so dense they blocked out the sun.
Beneath the ice, streams were filled with green water. Bears in these
mountains grew to seven feet, and their hides were so thick a whole hive
of bees couldn't sting them. It was dark as night on winter afternoons,
trappers had to carry flashlights and leave lanterns hung on their
snowmobiles in order to find their way back. Most of these men never
poached enough to get caught by the rangers, and anyone looking for them
would have had a difficult time. In the spring, moss appeared overnight
and covered any footprints completely by morning.
In winter, no one but a maniac or an experienced hunter would venture
into the forest. For those men who didn't fear the woods, there was
little chance of legal action against them. Trapping was, after all, a
criminal act without a witness. There was no one to hear a shotgun
fired, or the peculiar cry made by a fox when a piece of cyanide-laced
lamb takes effect.
The men who found him were an uncle and nephew who had worked the forest
for more than ten years and who were not nearly as greedy or cruel as
some of their neighbors. They worked in silence, not with poisoned meat
but with steel traps, and they were always particularly careful to stay
together, even when it made sense to split up, since they had seen,
several times, huge paw prints, three times as big as a dog's. In these
mountains all sorts of things were said on winter nights, some to be
believed, some not.
A man they knew, over in Cromley, had a wolf-skin rug on his living room
floor, head and all. He told everyone he'd shot the wolf, a male of
more than a hundred and ten pounds, head-on, but his wife had let it
slip that he'd simply found it the spring before, dead of natural
causes, preserved all winter long by the cold. Wolves were rare, even
this far north, you could probably count on your fingers the ones that
had come down from Canada and stayed.
Still, their tenuous presence made for good talk and real fear.
An old trapper who hadn't been caught once in sixty years of making a
living liked to scare some of the boys who were just starting out by
swearing that it was possible for some wolves to become human. He'd
seen it himself on a night when there was an orange hunter's moon. A
wolf was crouching down with the pack one minute and standing on two
feet like a man the next. That happened with old trappers
sometimes--they had killed more animals than they could number and, now
that they were senior citizens who couldn't eat anything but oatmeal,
they suddenly started to have some kind of funny regret that mixed them
up so badly they didn't even notice people were laughing at them.
The uncle and his nephew didn't listen to stories and they didn't take
foolish chances. As far as they were concerned, they weren't breaking
the law so much as taking care of their families. They were interested
in deer for the meat, foxes and raccoons for their skins, but they got
much more than that on the last day of December. This was the season
when the sky turned black at four-thirty and the cold made breathing
painful and sharp. They were inspecting the traps they had left out the
day before when they heard the howling. Normally they would have
backtracked, but they had worked all day with nothing to show and still
had one trap left to check. As they walked forward, it wasn't the cold
that made them shiver, and their brand-new parkas from Sears couldn't
help them one bit. The nephew's teeth were hitting against each other
so hard he thought he'd chip the enamel right off them.
It was hard to tell from the howling exactly how many wolves there were
until they saw them. What sounded like a dozen turned out to be three,
up above, on the ridgetop. All three were silver, brothers by the look
of them. They seemed to be waiting for the uncle and his nephew,
because as soon as they saw the men, the wolves stopped their racket.
Yet they stayed where they were, unprotected up there on the ridge.
When the uncle saw a pool of blood, he thought the wolves were after a
deer or a fisher caught in the last trap, and he figured it might be
best just to let them have it. The temperature had begun to drop and
the sun would soon be going down. The uncle would have turned back then
if his nephew hadn't grabbed his arm.
The last steel trap was a good one, kept oiled and cleaned, it would
last another fifty years. When they heard the whimpering sound, they
assumed they were simply suffering from the cold.
Hallucinations occurred in severe weather, they sprang up from the
ground fully formed. Jack Flannagan insisted he'd been visited by his
dead mother one day in the woods, when the temperature was ten below
zero. A friend of the nephew's would not hunt after dark, convinced
that a deer he had shot one snowy day had cried real tears, just like a
baby. So the wailing they heard might have been caused by twilight and
ice. The notion of going home began to feel about right, even
necessary. Then they saw the thing in the trap, struggling and
bleeding, its foot partially crushed, and they might have shot it then,
to put it out of its misery, if they hadn't realized, all at once, that
the struggling thing had the shape of a man.
The wolves took up their howling again, while the uncle labored to open
the trap. The nephew fired his gun in the air, even though he knew it
was bad luck to shoot at wolves, and they took off, across the ridge and
through the pine trees. It took almost two hours to get the poor
creature out of the trap and carry him back to the snowmobiles. A trail
of red blood burned through the snow. The drifts were now much higher,
so that a mile seemed to go on endlessly. The nephew wondered aloud
whether they'd be charged with murder if their unintended victim should
die. He was already unconscious and his skin had turned blue.
How had it been possible, the nephew asked his uncle, for him to have
survived through the winter, wearing only skins on his body and wrapped
around his feet? Why had they never seen him before, when they knew
every man for a hundred miles around?
The uncle didn't bother to answer, he was too busy tying the limp body
into the snowmobile with thick brown rope. Clouds were moving in fast,
threatening more snow. They had to get to the rangers' station, where a
helicopter ran an airlift to St. Joseph's Hospital in Cromley. The
uncle's breathing was ragged.
He knew for a fact that the trap had shattered the left foot, bone
jutted through the skin. As the uncle was positioning the head onto a
blanket he realized how young their victim was, younger than his nephew.
Once he looked at the pale face, with its high cheekbones and knots of
dark hair, he couldn't look away, even though he had removed his gloves
to lash the rope to the snowmobile and his fingers were freezing. If
he'd seen anything like this face before, it was in the chapel at St.
Joseph's, where he'd waited while his wife was being operated on for
something wrong inside her stomach a few years back.
To the right of the pews, in a dark alcove, there had been a statue made
of white wood with a countenance so calm it had made him weep.
He pulled his gloves back on and started his snowmobile. In less than
three hours, work would begin in the only operating room in St. Joseph's
as an orthopedic surgeon repaired the bones the steel trap had
shattered. Two weeks later, the patient would be flown to Kelvin
Medical Center on East Eighty-sixth Street in New York, a hospital that
dealt exclusively with victims of traumatic stress. There he would
stay, in a locked room, for the next few months, while some of the best
doctors in the city tried to ascertain what they were dealing with.
But the uncle knew what they had right then and there. It didn't matter
what people said on winter nights this year or the year after or the one
after that. It didn't matter what people believed. The uncle knew
exactly what it was they were dealing with, on this night and forever
after. They had caught themselves a wolf.
Robin Moore was stopped for speeding every time she drove through town.
It made no difference whether she was going thirty-three miles an hour
in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, or if teenagers in Trans Ams were revving
their engines and passing her by. She could tell when it was going to
happen, she'd get a funny taste in her mouth, as if she'd eaten a lemon
or a spoonful of salt, and then she'd hear the siren.
Robin always pulled over to the side of the road calmly, then rolled
down her window and waited.
"Is there a problem, Officer?" she'd say in a voice so sweet you'd
never guess at the depth of her bitterness or imagine that she knew
every local policeman by name. She'd had coffee with their wives, and
invited everyone over to the house for barbecues, she'd fixed onion dip
and guacamole on nights when the men had sat in her kitchen playing
poker.
The problem was that she was divorcing Roy, and either he thought it was
amusing to have his buddies stop her for minor infractions--an
inspection sticker overdue, a broken left taillight, the alleged
speeding--or he believed this harassment would make her realize she
needed him. Either way, Robin's glove compartment was now chock-full of
tickets, none of which she'd paid. She had fallen for Roy when she was
sixteen, the same age their son, Connor, was now: a dangerous and stupid
year when boys jumped into fast cars without thinking twice and girls
drank themselves silly down at the beach near Poorman's Point and
sometimes did enough damage to last a lifetime.
She couldn't keep away from Roy back then. The more trouble he got
into, the more her family despaired, the more she had to have him. His
father, Neil, had worked for Robin's grandfather and drawn up the
sketches for the arboretum when the land was nothing more than cattails
and scrub pine. In Nassau County, Roy's father was known as the Doctor,
since he could cure almost any tree, whether it was a dying elm or a
willow hit by lightning. Roy had started coming around with the Doctor
during the summer Robin turned sixteen, although it was clear he didn't
give a damn for willows and elms. He started throwing rocks at the
patio whenever she was out reading in the hammock. He began to wait for
her outside the kitchen door, near the rosemary and the Russian sage.
He kissed her for the first time beneath the arbor where the wisteria
bloomed. Not long after this kiss, and hundreds more like it, Robin's
grandfather made his declaration that under no circumstances could she
marry Roy, which pretty much sealed her fate.
And now, although they had a legal separation, Roy was somehow convinced
they were still together, even after their final fight, a nasty display
of distrust on the corner of Delaney. That night Robin went home and
dragged all of Roy's clothes out to the driveway, and when he got home
and saw his clothes flung across the concrete, he must have known where
they were heading. Yet almost a year later he continued to appear at
the house unexpectedly. He was there, he said, to check Connor's
homework--something he'd never done when he lived with them--or to make
certain the hot water heater wasn't on the fritz.
Once, he had arrived on a Saturday night and had done everything
possible to try to get her into bed. He came up behind her and
whispered, the way he used to: Just this one time, one littlefuck, come
on, baby. She thought he was kidding until he shoved his hand into her
pants, and she had to push him away. The next day he'd come back,
sheepish and polite, with a peace offering: a truckful of manure, which
he said the Doctor had asked him to deliver, highly unlikely, since
Robin had just seen her father-in-law that morning and he hadn't
mentioned a word about cow shit.
When Robin was starting out, the Doctor never viewed her as competition,
surely there were enough gardens on the island for them both. He sent
her customers and called nurseries out on the East End to get her a
discount. He taught her to hang jars of beer from fruit trees so that
wasps could drink themselves to death, and to circle herb gardens with a
ring of salt, which slugs wouldn't dare to cross.
It was true that Robin spent too long with each client, poring over
books, plotting out designs for perennial beds in watercolor and ink,
but that wasn't the reason her business was ailing.
Lately, everything she touched seemed to die. Robin attributed this to
the anger she had carried around all winter, ever since her breakup with
Roy. If she pruned a rosebush in the morning, by midafternoon the canes
would begin to wither, by evening they would turn black. Just last
night, she'd discovered that every bulb in the pot of forced tulips on
her dining room table had decayed only minutes after she'd torn off some
of the yellowing leaves. All week there had been good weather for
gardens, with a light rain turning the cold earth squishy and
warm--perfect conditions to begin spring cleanup for her regular
clients-- but Robin didn't bother to return any of their calls.
Whatever bad luck she was having might seep through the old leather
gloves she wore when she cut back brambles and raked mulch off the
season's first lilies-of-the-valley.
This stretch of sour fortune wasn't the reason she was driving in to see
her brother, although it now seemed as if just getting out of town would
take all day. Already she had been pulled over twice, once near the
King Kullen supermarket by that moron Woody Preston, who grinned as he
wrote out a speeding ticket--four miles over the limit-- and the second
time only a mile from the bridge, where George Tenney at least had the
decency to look embarrassed as he wrote out the ticket for failing to
signal when she changed lanes. Robin had tossed the ticket into the
overflowing glove compartment right in front of him.
"You're going to have to start paying those," George said of her growing
collection.
"I don't think so," Robin said. She hadn't bothered to dress up and was
wearing her rain slicker, a pair of jeans, a khaki-colored sweater, old
green boots. She had small callused hands and beneath each fingernail
was a line of dirt that seemed never to wash away, not even if she sat
in the bath for hours and used her good soap from Italy.
"You could give Roy another chance," George suggested. He was a large,
soft man who loved poker and almost went nuts when his own wife left
him. For months afterward, Roy brought him home for dinner on Tuesday
nights, and George ate steadily and slowly, asking for the peas or the
rolls in a wounded voice.
"Are you a marriage counselor?" Robin asked him.
"Well, no," George said. "I can't say that I am."
"Okay, George, just tell me this. Was Roy fucking around the whole time
we were married, or just at the end?"
"Robin," George said in that wounded voice. "That's not nice."
"No, it's not," Robin agreed. A fine rain had begun, and Robin turned
on the windshield wipers, then gunned the engine of the pickup so it
wouldn't die on her as it often did in damp weather.
"Do you want to come over for dinner on Friday? Vegetarian lasagna, but
you won't be able to tell there's no meat."
"You know I can't," George said. He'd known Robin forever and he hadn't
had a home-cooked meal for months, but it wasn't a good idea to
socialize with a beautiful woman who happened to be Roy's not-quite
ex-wife.
"It's not like I'm asking you for a date, George," Robin said.
"But hey, I guess it's good to find out who your real friends are."
She said this just to ride him, since she knew that anyone connected
with the police department had to side with Roy. People simply couldn't
stand it when your marriage broke up, they took it personally.
Even Robin's oldest friend, Michelle Altero, who had never liked Roy,
and had cried at their wedding, real sobs, not just polite tears, had
suggested she give him another chance.
"Can I go now?" Robin asked George.
"Sure," George said. He wasn't too happy about standing on the side of
the service road in the rain, getting involved in someone's private
affairs. "Where is it you're going, anyway?" he asked. He truly
believed he was being casual.
"Who wants to know?" Robin said.
She could be real fresh when she wanted to be, which George figured came
from growing up with the notion she'd be rich someday. As it was, he
knew for a fact she'd been hours away from having her electricity cut
off the month before. Roy had thought that might bring her back to him,
but it hadn't worked out that way. The electric company had given her a
five-day extension, and before Roy could persuade them otherwise, Robin
had paid offher bill.
"Come on, Robin," George said.
"Tell Roy, where I go is none of his business."
"How do you think Old Dick would have liked what's happened between you
and Roy?" George asked. "Did you ever consider that?"
Robin hated to hear her grandfather referred to as Old Dick, but she
kept her mouth shut. This is what happened when you grew up on an
island, people assumed they had a perfect right to pull you over on a
service road and give you marital advice. Maybe Robin's brother had
been right, when he and Kay broke up, Stuart moved into Manhattan. He
couldn't pass a single street corner in town without being reminded of a
dozen things he'd done or said. It was like living with ghosts: he
couldn't have a cup of coffee at Fred's Diner in peace without having
some phantom settle down on the stool beside him.
"My grandfather always despised Roy," Robin announced. In fact, there
wasn't a man in town her grandfather hadn't loathed. "He refused to
come to our wedding."
"Old Dick would never have favored a divorce," George insisted, but he
let her go and watched mournfully as she pulled her truck onto the
service road, then headed toward the bridge where the willow trees grew.
Once she crossed over, no one on the local police force could stop her,
she'd be out of their jurisdiction, driving as fast as she pleased.
Beside the wooden bridge, the thick twisted roots of the old willows
coiled through the muddy earth. Anyone who approached the island for
the first time at dusk could easily believe that these willows had once
been men, they seemed to cry out loud and their thin branches tapped
against the hoods of passing cars. No one knew when the trees had been
planted, but they were already old when Richard Aaron first came to the
island in 1923. They'd frightened off everyone but the bravest
fishermen and the cats that someone had once brought across to drown in
a burlap bag but that had escaped to breed in the marshes, living wild
on bluefish and sparrows.
There was no bridge back then, and Aaron had to put on black hip boots
and wade through the water to the other side, stepping over hermit crabs
and moon snails. He'd paid thirteen thousand dollars cash for the
island--a good deal even then, one he'd managed because the previous
owner believed that warm air rising from marshes caused malaria and
scarlet fever. On the north side the first big Queen Annes were built,
with stone fireplaces and fish-head shingles, on the south side were
workers' cottages for the stonemasons and carpenters, some of whom
stayed on after their work was through. Off to the west, Aaron built
his own house, with bricks carted over the bridge, and panels of stained
glass that were tied to the masons' backs with thick rope, then covered
with white muslin to protect them from cracking. He kept five acres of
black pine and beach grass and Rosa rugosa for himself, most of which
was to become
Poorman's Point after his only son squandered everything on a real
estate venture in Florida that went wrong because of hurricanes or bad
economic times or simple carelessness.
Old Dick was not dead, as many people on the island assumed, although he
was always talked about in the past tense. He was ninety-one years old
and had outlived his son and his sisters and brothers and just about
everybody else he considered to be worth two cents. The main house had
been closed down for more than twenty years, and Old Dick lived above
the garage with his housekeeper, Ginny, who was eighty-four. He
couldn't get out of his bed unless he was lifted, and he hadn't seen
sunlight for years, but when Robin went to visit him he was still able
to muster the strength to scream at her. She went only once a month, on
the last Sunday, making certain always to bring an apple pie.
A good apple pie was the one thing Old Dick wouldn't scream about, and
Robin sneaked slices to him, on paper plates, since Ginny didn't allow
him any sugar or salt.
And that's what Robin was going to see Stuart about. Trying to get
Stuart on the phone was always so frustrating, and this was too
important, she couldn't wait. Ginny's health was failing and her
daughters wanted to send her to a nursing home in NewJersey, and then
what the hell would they do with Old Dick? Stuart had been all but
supporting him, since Social Security was barely enough to pay Ginny's
weekly salary, and there were food and heating bills and medicine to
consider. The truth of it was, Stuart had been helping Robin out, too,
since she didn't want to ask Roy for any more than the pittance she was
legally allowed.
Thank goodness for Stuart, who was so practical, he liked to joke, that
he applied to medical school when he realized he needed a
twenty-four-hour-a-day psychiatrist and decided it was cheaper to become
one than to engage one at the going rates. When he and Kay divorced,
Stuart had insisted she buy a Volvo, after checking every import's
safety record, he heartily disapproved of Robin's old pickup, which, as
she now approached the Midtown Tunnel, skidded as it always did when she
was in a hurry and the asphalt was wet.
There were no meters free, so Robin had to park in one of the expensive
lots, on Eighty-fifth, then run through the rain over to Kelvin Medical
Center, but at least she was wearing her boots.
By the time she reached the building, her hair had unwound from its
elastic band and her rain slicker was dripping wet. The storm had now
begun in earnest, the kind of downpour that flooded gutters and whipped
umbrellas into the air. When Robin got out of the elevator on the
fourteenth floor, her ears ached with the drop in air pressure. She was
on her way to Stuart's office, thinking about Medicare and lasagna and a
new mildewresistant variety of aster, when the Wolf Man was led into the
hallway.
Because he was handcuffed, the attendants assumed he was harmless, they
left him in the corridor while they went to sign for his transfer. The
air was so murky and still that the mice grew confused, and believing it
was midnight, they dashed out of the heating vents. A few nurses and
attendants who had the day off had come in just to get a glimpse of the
Wolf Man, and they were disappointed when he kept his eyes downcast.
Patients on crutches struggled to their doorways in their hospital gowns
so that someday they could tell their grandchildren they'd been there,
right in the same hospital, breathing the very same air, but most of
them mistook the Wolf Man for a maintenance worker and looked right past
him.
"Is that him?" Robin asked one of the nurses. "The Wolf Man?"
"We're not supposed to call him that," the nurse told her, but of course
Stuart called him that all the time, at least in private.
Stuart had talked about this patient constantly when he'd first been
flown in from Michigan. All the cases of children raised by animals had
been dubious, records had been tampered with, fears reported as fact,
medical histories obscured, so that one never knew whether ill children
simply had been abandoned out in the woods, where no one was likely to
find them, by families too poor or overwhelmed to cope. Not one of
these children had ever gained enough language to tell his own story,
and Stuart's hope was that this patient would change all that.
If they were lucky, he had been able to speak before he was lost, and
with help he might remember all he once knew. But by the beginning of
March, Stuart no longer discussed the Wolf Man with Robin, and by the
end of the month the arguments he offered to his colleagues about
keeping the patient at the medical center sounded weak, even to him.
Through all the hours of therapy, the patient had not spoken one word.
"Well, he doesn't look very fierce," Robin said to the nurse.
"Oh, really?" the nurse said archly, as she started down the hall.
"He'd bite your head offin a minute. He'd slit your throat and never
think twice."
The Wolf Man was hunched over on a wooden bench in his black overcoat,
which was two sizes too big. His hair had been clipped so short Robin
could see his scalp. There was a gash in the back of his neck, left
when the barber's hand had begun to tremble.
Robin took off her yellow slicker and shook out the rain, she would have
continued on to Stuart's office at the end of the hall if she hadn't
seen a mouse scurry along the bench. Behind his back, the Wolf Man
closed his fist over the mouse before it had the chance to dart away.
Then he looked at Robin, suddenly, as if he knew he was being watched.
Robin stayed exactly where she was, dripping rain onto the linoleum,
even after the Wolf Man turned his back to her. Slowly he opened his
hand, and the mouse ran in circles, as though dazed by the scent of
human flesh, before scurrying off to hide in a heating vent. For weeks
the WolfMan had been thinking how easy it would be to tear out one of
his doctors' throats during their sessions together. The doctor would
reach for a pen, or turn to look out the window, and he wouldn't even
know what was happening until his shirt was drenched with blood and
clouds filled his vision. It was the same with a deer. Even if it was
still struggling, you knew it had given up the fight when its eyes
turned white, when it saw something so far away it wasn't even in this
world.
The thunderstorm had moved in quickly, across the river, from NewJersey.
The windows were rattling. Alone on the bench, the Wolf Man began to
shiver. If he hadn't, Robin would never have gone over to him. When
she reached out and touched his arm, the heat from her fingers went
right through his black coat and into his skin. She was the first
person to touch him who didn't have to. He still had blood blisters all
over his hands and feet, and on rainy days like this the scar that ran
along the inside of his thigh ached horribly. Lately, he had been
remembering things that seemed to belong to someone else: forks and
spoons set out on a kitchen table, slices of an orange on a blue china
plate.
"It's just thunder," Robin said.
It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring. He knew that by
heart. They thought he understood nothing, but he had heard them
talking, right in front of him. The attendant who had kicked his shins
while the handcuffs were clasped on was coming down the hall, tossing a
set of keys in the air and catching them in the palm of his hand. The
Wolf Man looked at the woman next to him, the heat from her touch moved
upward, into his throat, until at last the words came out on their own,
like birds rising.
"Don't let them take me someplace," he said.
When you spoke after so many years, the words actually hurt, each one a
crooked bone, a fishhook, a burning star.
Robin dropped her hand from his arm, her rain slicker fell at her feet.
Something made her skin feel hot, and although it might have been pity,
it might just as easily have been something else.
The Wolf Man had known enough to keep what was inside him secret, and
now he cursed himself. He should never have said a word. He looked
down at the linoleum tiles on the floor, he tried not to breathe. The
edge of the handcuffs cut through the skin above his wrists. In only a
few hours, they'd transfer him and he'd be gone forever. Already, he
was starting to disappear. Soon he would forget that the upturned
leaves on the trees predicted whether or not it would rain, and that a
rabbit dared not move if you covered its eyes. That was how they
decided what to take down, at least he remembered that. They went after
whatever was frightened and gave up easily. Anything that had the
courage to stare you down, you let pass by.
And so, in spite of the thunder, he raised his eyes. As soon as he saw
her looking at him that way, he knew he hadn't made a mistake. By then,
Robin was telling the attendants that she'd been sent to pick up their
patient. Later, in the hallway near the elevator, she would inform the
social worker from the State Hospital that the transfer had been
canceled. No one had reason to doubt her, not even when she insisted
that handcuffs were no longer necessary. And although there was now
lightning streaking the sky and the clouds were the size of black
mountains, the Wolf Man smiled, exactly as the cook who baked his
birthday cake vowed he could, when the attendant handed over the key.
THE EVENING had turned sweet and blue. Mockingbirds appeared in the
gardens to pull worms from the rich, damp earth, and all through the
island you could hear their stolen songs. It was the hour when deer
ventured out of the pine woods to feast on ivy and potted geraniums,
when raccoons in the marshes scooped up mouthfuls of mullet and snails,
and the blue air made people dizzy and thankful for all that they had.
Commuters returning from the city were so anxious to get home they
bolted from their trains and ran for the wooden bridge, their umbrellas
unfurling behind them like black wings. How lucky to live here, far
摘要：

SecondNaturebyAliceHofmanBerkleyPubGroup;ISBN:0425146812Copyright1995Natureneverdeceivesus,itisalwayswewhodeceiveourselves.--Jean-JacquesRousseau.BYAPRILmostpeoplehadalreadyforgottenabouthim,exceptforsomeofthenursesonthefloor,whocrossedthemselveswhentheywalkedpasthisroom.Theguardstationedoutsidehisd...

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