CHAPTER TWENTY
It's mid-afternoon, the first really warm one of spring, and a haze of green pollen has turned the clearing smoky even in this bright sunlight.
Seamus found canvas and rope in the greenhouse and has rigged himself a hammock here at the edge of the trees. He's also tied a rope from a branch so he can swing himself, which he's doing with violence. It looks like someone is smuggling a pile of laundry into the meadow.
I'm lying on a blanket on the ground beside the hammock, watching his dirty bare foot hanging off the side as it swings towards me and away. A breeze slips cool through the field. The patch of sky above me is robin's-egg blue, the leaves a glowing green. And in spite of all this idyll I'm uncomfortable. Tonight is the milk moon. I have the old feeling of restless hunger starting inside me, the precursor of the change. I do not like to admit what this tension reminds me of. Digging in the garden all morning has given me something to do, but now we're finished, and Seamus is amusing himself by taunting me. It's as though he can tell.
"The problem with you," his lazy drawl comes from above, punctuated by the creak of the ropes, "is you have too much time to think."
I've been throwing bits of bark and dried mud at the foot but my aim is hampered by the target's constant motion. So far I've made three hits. Most of the misses have ended up inside the hammock.
"Hm," I answer.
"Didn't say it's your only problem." A piece of mud jumps through the air above me and lands on my shoulder. He's returning fire. "We don't have time for me to tell you the rest."
"Good," I say.
But he's warming to the subject. A hand appears over the edge of the hammock. Between his thumb and middle finger is a piece of bark, which he flicks at me, and then the fingers extend, one by one, as he enumerates my flaws. "Let's see... too much time to think, I've said that. Too serious. That one's probably the worst. Never talk, so that it's me what has to do all the conversation."
I have thrown a piece of root, a fairly large one, and there is a moment of silence as it makes contact. He lobs it out of bounds and resumes. "You go round as if you're the only one on earth that has a worry. Then you make a whole day of it."
I scrape around but I've run out of bark. I pull the edge of the blanket up to dig beneath.
"And you slouch. At first I figure it's because you hit your head in doorways but really," his voice lowers and there's an undercurrent of raw glee beneath it, "it's because you're carrying about your great secret. Isn't it."
My jaw grits shut. My heartbeat starts up in my throat. "What great secret would that be?"
He dances away from the bait. "That's your problem, not mine. I could guess, though. Or make one up, and I'd probably be right."
"Let's hear it." I should've left him in the cave.
"Then I'd be out of ammunition. I might need it in the future." He's enjoying himself; I can hear it in his voice. "To blackmail you."
I let a silence happen between us as I'm digesting this. Agnes may have been right after all. The hammock creaks and swings above me. I'm glad he can't see my face.
"You could tell anyone anything you wanted," I say, "and they'd likely believe you." I'm forcing lightness into my tone that I do not feel. "Especially if they never see you again."
Delighted laughter comes from inside the hammock.
"That's the spirit, Henry. Finally."
"What would you ask for, anyhow? Money?"
"All sorts of things. I'd need to make a list." A finger taps the canvas, thoughtfully. "I could use a new hat."
"That's true," I say, looking over to where the current one is lying upside down in the dirt.
"I could use..." He trails off, and I hear him decide to abandon the game just as easily as he started it. "Well, we'll come to terms when I need it. I'll leave a message under your breakfast plate, written in blood."
"Of course. Ask me if you need help with the spelling." Handling it fine, I think. Just playing. But my body is like knitted wire.
He laughs, then yawns. The canvas moves. His foot flexes and shivers as he stretches. We are quiet for some time, except for the creaking of the rope. Then he says, offhandedly, sleepily, "I don't mind you anyway, Henry," which I suppose is his casual summing-up of my list of flaws. Around us the beauty of the afternoon deepens. Gold stretches across the field. We are both quiet again, but only one of us is at peace.
.
We've eaten dinner an hour early. There was no explanation. For the little things it's often better not to try. And now dusk is simmering on the horizon and I can feel every bone in my body. Or, more accurately, I feel my body: every breath and every shift of rib, each thrum of blood. I have perhaps thirty minutes, forty-five, before it begins.
Seamus is standing in the hall where I've stopped him before he could follow me upstairs. Agnes is, for once, nowhere to be found, I suppose in a desire to leave this part to me.
"Tomorrow instead for the game? If you don't mind." I say. "I'm tired. The sun." I'm aware of how bad it is.
He smiles, and it's the kind of sardonic, one-sided smile that a person gives you when they know they're being fed a line, but there's nothing I can do about this. We wait a breath. For a moment I wonder if what Agnes said about my face is true. Or if he can hear, as I can, my heart pounding double-time in my chest, as it does before it happens: my own heart and then behind it the shadow sound, the echo, my wolf's heart, gaining traction.
"All right," he says, and I am probably fooling myself that in this I hear a form of compassion. Then he reaches out, rests a hand on my arm, not the usual farewell tap. He leaves it against me. I feel the pressure extend from his fingertips, not gentle, and I recognize two things in swift succession: One, that his offer of blackmail was no joke. Two, that with this touch he is offering me something else as well. What it is I don't understand, or have any sort of reply to. I can no longer meet his eye; I watch the sharp point of his Adam's apple tap against the skin of his throat as he tells me good night.
The hand is gone and he's left the hallway. It's only now that I register the words he said, which were not good night then, Henry, as usual, but bon voyage.
.
I haven't seen the full moon in sixteen years. I can feel it, of course, but that's different, like hearing someone calling you from another room. Tomorrow night I will stand in the damp grass of the dark garden and watch its waning face slide over the sky but that is different, too.
When I lived in the villa with my parents our cook would buy peaches by the basket and I would go in the cellar and steal them. If I bit the skin of an overripe peach and pulled just right, I remember, it would tear away, a thin fuzzy membrane, and underneath the flesh would spring out wet and sweet, pink-gold, dripping. I'm sure it was this, and the dozens of experiences like this that I also enjoyed, that unnerved my parents, that prepared them for the time when I would start changing. Probably my mother looked out the window, saw me hunched on the back steps, lips curled back, tearing the soft skin from a peach, and her heart went cold. But I can't apologize now, can't go back in time and undo the fearfulness of my childhood, can't console her. What I wish I could do instead is look up. Catch her eye. Make room on the step for her to sit beside me. Offer her a peach, a perfect orb, complete as the moon, and teach her the trick I'd learned: how to peel the fragile skin away from the meat, in one snarling bite.
.
As I'm kneeling beside the door, pushing the key under, I glance up and see the thousands of handprints and fingernail gouges along the edges. They're mine, of course. I have been doing this for years, locking myself in, then making my hands bleed in the hope of getting back out. And it doesn't occur to me till this moment that a terrible part- maybe the worst part of it all- is that, if I could let it, this monthly transformation would be a source of intense pleasure. If I could just go outside and run, if I could only allow what my body asks.
But I can't. It is wrong. Instead I crouch down and, with my fingertips, shove the key out of sight.