The Better to Hold You (11 page)

“Telazol,” Malachy shouted, “in the fridge.” I opened the small refrigerator, grabbed the syringe, and plunged it into the dog’s flank. The Dalmatian lashed its neck to the right, releasing Malachy as it reacted to me, the new threat. Growling, the Dalmatian curled its upper lip as it prepared to pounce.

“Oh God,” I said, knowing the sedative was not going to take effect in time. And then the dog was on me, his front paws pressing down on my shoulders, and I couldn’t help it: I closed my eyes. There was a sharp crack, and I screamed as the full weight of the dog came down on my chest. I looked up, and there was Malachy looming over me, except that for a confused second he didn’t look like Malachy at all. His eyes seemed to glow with an eerie, phosphorescent blue-green light, and he looked bigger, wilder, stronger, his arms grotesquely attenuated, as if he had stretched them out from across the room to break the Dalmatian’s neck.

But that’s impossible, I thought, and then I passed out.

“Jesus,” someone said.

“Is she bleeding?”

I was wondering the same thing myself as I came back to consciousness with Lilliana and Ofer and Sam standing around me. It’s very disconcerting to be the victim of a medical drama; I think that when we watch this stuff on television, we all tend to identify with the doctors and nurses, the ones standing on their feet with all their clothes on and their skin intact.

“Okay, someone help me pick this guy up and get an IV going,” said Ofer.

Lilliana knelt down to stroke my hair. “Abra, you okay?”

I tried to nod as Ofer and another intern lifted the dead dog off me.

Malachy crouched down beside me. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice softer than I had ever heard it before, filled with regret. “Did he bite you? Did he break the skin?”

I looked up at him, remembering that strange, distorted glimpse of him that I’d had before I’d passed out. Shock, I thought, but couldn’t help wondering: Had Malachy used himself as a test subject? If so, he certainly hadn’t turned into a wolf man.

“Your jacket is ripped,” I said, realizing that Malachy’s lab coat had been shredded, as if he’d worn it through a cyclone.

“Irrelevant. Show me where you’re injured,” Malachy said, and I realized I hadn’t answered his last question.

I met his eyes, understanding why this was his paramount concern. “He didn’t bite me.”

Malachy looked so relieved that I caught a glimpse of what he must have looked like when he was younger, softer, more capable of emotion. I found myself wondering if he ever had been in a real romantic relationship, or if science was the only passion that had ever moved him. Perhaps this secret underground laboratory was the place where his truest self could emerge. And then I realized: Malachy must have called the rest of the team down to help me. Which meant it wasn’t a secret anymore.

For the rest of the day, people kept coming up to me and making bad Dalmatian jokes. Want a fur coat, Abra? Just say the word. I tried not to think about the wolf card, reversed. Did a Dalmatian attack count? Or was this some divine coyote practical joke? That’s the problem with tarot cards: Anything can mean anything.

Sam walked by me in the hall. “You okay now? Not seeing spots?” I pretended an exasperation I did not feel. But all of us were pretending, really. Underneath our facade of normalcy, we were wound tight with the tension of not knowing our fates. By the end of the day, we heard the official confirmation: Malachy Knox was no longer employed by the Animal Medical Institute.

We hadn’t seen our teacher since the EMTs had arrived, crowding into the lab along with Mr. Simcox, the cadaverous head of administrative affairs. We’d managed to convince the emergency medical technicians that I didn’t need to go to the emergency room, and then Mr. Simcox had summoned two guards to escort Malachy from the building.

Something about Malachy’s unruffled demeanor suggested to me that he’d managed to cram some files into his briefcase while Simcox had been distracted.

“You’ll all be fine,” he said, nonchalantly removing his torn lab coat and pulling a tweed jacket off a hook on the back of the door. His bony arms, I noticed, protruded from the frayed cuffs of his shirt as if the sleeves had shrunk—or his arms had grown.

As the guards herded him out, Malachy added, “They’ll just assign you all to other teams.”

“But Dr. Knox,” said Sam, “what’s going to happen to you?”

Malachy shocked us all by grinning with real amusement. “To tell you the truth, my boy, I haven’t the faintest idea.” And with that, he left us, whistling under his breath and swinging his briefcase with surprising vigor as he walked out of our lives.

I am in the AMI cafeteria and Lilliana hands me a straw basket. “You have to bring this to Malachy, Abs. He’s not at all well.”

“Where is he?”

Lilliana points to the basement corridor. “Down there. But just go straight to his laboratory and don’t open any of the other doors.”

“I promise.” Then I am in my own apartment and I open the door to our bedroom to find Hunter masturbating with what appears to be a piece of liver. Just like in Portnoy’s Complaint, I think. At this point, I understand that I am dreaming.

“Excellent! You’ve brought more food,” says Hunter. “Is there any meat in there?”

“It’s not for you,” I explain. “This is work-related.” I back out the door and I’m in the basement again, walking toward Malachy’s laboratory. There’s a young woman crouched in a corner, holding her stomach as if she’s in pain. She’s wearing a red hooded sweatshirt that conceals her face, just like in that sixties movie, what was it called, Don’t Look Now. Recalling the film’s ending, I immediately suspect the child of being a homicidal dwarf.

“Are you all right?” I ask, cautiously.

“No, I’m not all right,” says the girl, pulling back her hood. She has a winsome, pointed face, and she seems angry and frightened. “Look at me! Look what he did!”

“You look fine to me,” I say, and then I see that the hands peeking out of her sleeves are the hairy paws of a wolf. “Oh, you poor thing.”

“No, no, I’m supposed to be a wolf,” said the girl. “He did this to me!” Not knowing what to do for her, I reach into the basket and hand her a sweet roll.

“Thanks,” she calls after me, gobbling it up with canine enthusiasm. “Oh! Hey! Don’t let him take his clothes off!”

Unsure if she means Malachy or someone else, I nod my head. When I reach the door to the lab, it turns into the front door to my mother’s house. My husband opens it. He is wearing my mother’s purple caftan.

“Hunter,” I say. “Where’s my mother?”

“I am your mother now,” he says.

“No, you’re just wearing her clothes. What have you done with her?”

“I have incorporated her into my being, so I can be everything to you. I don’t have a mother, so why should you? You don’t need anything or anyone else but me.”

“That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

“Just hand over the goodies.” I lay the basket on the table, and before I can stop him, Hunter pulls off the caftan. I protest, remembering the wolf girl’s warning, but suddenly Hunter is on top of me, and he’s a wolf, his fangs inches from my throat. I close my eyes and feel his dead weight collapse on top of me.

“You can open them now,” says a familiar, Texas-flavored voice. I look up and see Red Mallin, Wildlife Removal Operator, dressed in a plaid lumberjack shirt and carrying an ax. He looks subtly younger and handsomer in this dream, just like an actor who’s gone from a bit part to a starring role.

“I think you’re getting better lighting,” I say. Then, taking in the lumberjack shirt and remembering Sam’s comment, I add, “You’re not a bear, are you?”

“Different animal entirely. Come on, Doc. Open your eyes now.”

“They are open. I’m looking right at you.”

Red leans close, and I can smell his breath. It’s nice breath. It smells like he’s been chewing mint leaves. “You’ve got to wake up, darlin’.” And then, as if he can’t help himself, he puts his nose in my hair and takes a deep, snuffling breath. I pull back when I realize that his nose is cold and wet. Of course it is—he’s a wolf, too.

I open my eyes and wake up.

For a moment, I didn’t know where I was, and then I realized that I was in my own living room. I must have fallen asleep on the couch. After a long and surprisingly sympathetic talk with my mom, I’d sat down to watch CNN until Hunter returned.

It had been comforting to talk to my mother about the Dalmatian’s attack and Malachy’s dismissal, but the person I really wanted to tell was my husband. Now, barely able to shake off the vividness of my dream, I turned the set off, feeling wide awake and more than a little unsettled.

It was one A.M., and Hunter wasn’t home yet. He had said that he might go to a late night café to write, and not to wait up for him, so I wasn’t even entitled to be mad. I filled the kettle with fresh water and set it on a high flame.

There was a good chance my mother was still awake. Better than good. But despite the ease of our earlier conversation, I was reluctant to expose more of my marital problems to her.

When she’d first met Hunter seven years ago, she’d flirted with him. I didn’t really blame her: She’d never met any of my boyfriends before and had no idea how to behave. When she realized Hunter was laughing at her, she became his sworn enemy.

“I suppose you like my daughter because your own mother is somewhat lacking,” she said, chopping kidneys for the cats.

“Interesting insight,” said Hunter, looking at my mother in a manner even she could not misinterpret as favorable. “Do you think it’s something Abra and I might have in common?”

After Hunter graduated college and our weekends together grew more and more infrequent, my mother began to call him my ex-boyfriend. As in, “that ex-boyfriend of yours I never liked.”

Most of our friends assume that Hunter and I had been together since college, but the real story was more complicated. After I graduated, we moved in together, but we had stopped sleeping together, and Hunter began calling me his roommate. I think he wanted me as protection in case his landlord decided to evict him while he was away in Anchorage or Pulau Pangkor or Goa. I worked at various animal shelters, saving money and applying to veterinary schools, while Hunter came and went, sometimes for months at a time. My mother asked me what the hell I thought I was doing. I told her we were friends now. What was wrong with sharing an apartment with a friend?

So I mailed out the bills while he was away and provided protection from clingy girlfriends when he was in town. His girlfriends always asked me for advice, then never took it. I told them to act as if they were his friends, not his lovers.

And then I went off to Tufts for four years. When I graduated, I came back to New York to visit Hunter and we got drunk and wound up having energetic sex all night long. It was so much fun. I’d forgotten how sex could be like that, like a game of Twister—left foot on red, right arm on blue, now you go here and whoa!

We got married a year later, on the gray day after Valentine’s in City Hall. I tried not to let on how surprised I was; there’s really no dignified way to ask a man why he has proposed to you. There were no guests. We asked another couple on line to be our witnesses. I wore a plain light beige silk dress that had looked great in the shop but made me look stern and matronly when I put it on; Hunter wore jeans and a sweater. Our honeymoon was one unbearable weekend in his family’s grand Victorian ruin of a house in Northside, New York. His mother had committed suicide when Hunter was a teenager, but his father was there, unexpectedly; he kept saying how funny it was that we had just gotten married. There were a lot of loaded comments about the proud Barrow lineage and a debt owed to future generations, and it took me a whole day to understand that Hunter’s father was under the mistaken impression that my parents were rich. Awkwardly, I explained that neither my father nor my mother had the money to help renovate the house. Even if the tower room was in danger of falling into the basement. Even if the 1920s radiators hissed like cats but didn’t give off much in the way of heat and the grimly shadowed upper two floors still had gas lighting.

Even if it was the heritage of my future children.

“Oh, well,” Hunter said. “Maybe we could just kill your mother and move into the El Greco house.”

In the end, it was his father who financed us while Hunter wrote and I applied to AMI’s internship program. But my mother never got over her conviction that Hunter wasn’t to be trusted.

Steam was beginning to whistle in the kettle and I removed it from the burner. I had just poured boiling water into my mug of powdered cocoa mix when the phone rang.

“Hello, Abs.”

Not Hunter. My mother. Stupidly, I’d just taken a sip of cocoa and started choking on my reply.

“Hello, hello, are you all right?”

“Sorry, Mom. I just burned the tip of my tongue.”

“Honey, what is it?”

I broke like an eggshell. “Oh, Mom, Hunter’s not home yet. I haven’t even had a chance to tell him about what happened at work.” Or about the possibility that he had caught the lycanthropy virus; I’d neglected to tell my mother that as well. “I’m worried Hunter’s getting ready to leave me.”

“Is that all? Baby, I’m more worried he’s not.”

I thought about hanging up, but instead I told her about my dream.

“Are you sure that Texan guy was also a wolf? The cards included a wolf and a coyote.”

I thought about that. “I think he was really this man I met. I think it was one of those mental puns—you know, all men are wolves.”

“You met a man?” My mother’s voice was suddenly bright with interest. It was so easy for her to go off point.

“A wildlife removal operator, Mom. As in, kills the squirrels hiding in your basement.” At least I assumed he killed the animals he removed, although, remembering the owlet, I wondered.

“Oh. Well. But if he’s attractive, at least sleep with him. The big mistake you make is letting Hunter have all the power. I’d just feel so much better about your relationship if I knew you were cheating on him from time to time.”

On that note I did hang up.