When I Forget, He Keeps

Nine days after they put her mother in the ground, Maren Voss opened her own hand in the grove and waited for the wolf. He was late. The rite book lay open on the flat stone with a river rock holding the page down. The cut ran from the heel of her thumb to the middle of her palm. Deeper than she had meant it. Blood was going down her wrist and into her sleeve, and she had decided not to look at how much of it there was, because looking did not change anything and she still had four lines to get through. Midnight had come and gone. Two hundred years of that book. Nine women written in it. Not one entry said he had ever been late. She said the opening line to the trees. Her voice came out flat and thin, the way it had when she was eleven and had to read in front of the whole school. Nothing moved. Past the tree line the village had its lights on. A dog went off twice and quit. "Say that again," a man said. She did not turn around. Turning around was the thing you did not do. "I'll say it when you're standing where you're supposed to be." "Where I'm supposed to be." He sounded tired of the sentence. "She used to say that too." He came out of the oaks on her left, which was the wrong side, and stopped at the edge of the ring she had cut into the ground. Barefoot. In November. The coat was gray wool and short in the arm, and it had been somebody's before it was his. His hair was wet to the scalp. Low on his chest, in the V of the open collar, was a burn the shape of a hand. Her mother's hand. Maren knew it the way she knew her own handwriting. "Look at me and not at that," he said. "You've got two days left on it." "Less than that." His eyes went past her, to the book. "Why are you doing it with your own hand." "Because you didn't come when I called you at the house." "I heard you at the house." She had known he would say that. It was still different, hearing it out loud from a man standing in the dark eleven feet away, barefoot on frozen ground, with her mother's hand burned into his chest. "You could walk back down that hill," he said. "Nine of them thought about it. Two of them started." "And?" "One got as far as the bus stop." She knew the story. Everyone in the village knew a version of the story, and the versions did not agree, and that was the trouble with a village. "The sun comes up at six forty," she said. "If I don't finish the words before then, what happens." "What usually happens." He looked down the slope at the lights and did it the way a man looks at water he has already been in. "I go through them. A few of them get bitten. The ones that get bitten have a week. Then somebody from the city comes out with trucks, and I get to be a story again." "Then hold still." "You have not asked me the price." "The book has the price." "The book has the part of the price that sounds like poetry." He took one step in, onto the cut ring, and the cold where he put his foot was not the cold of November. "Ask your uncle what the rest of it is. Ask him tonight. Make him say it with his face where you can watch it." "My uncle is asleep." "Your uncle is on the ridge with a lantern. He has been standing there since half past eleven." She looked up. The light was there. Small, low, moving down through the black between the trunks at the pace of a man who has walked the same hill a hundred times and knows exactly how long it takes. "Is he going to tell me the truth?" "No." "Then why would I ask." "Because I want to see which lie he picks." The wolf put his hands in his coat pockets. "He picks a different one for each of you. Your mother got the best one. Hers was almost true." Maren crouched and put her thumb on the first line of the book. The words were not English and they were not Latin, and her mother had made her say them every night for a year the way other children got prayers. She had never once asked what they meant. She was asking now, silently, with her mouth already moving. She got through the first three lines. Somewhere in the fourth, her hand began to hurt, and the hurt was not in her hand. "Keep going," he said. She kept going. When the last word was out of her, she stood up and pressed her cut palm flat against the burn on his chest, and the burn was warm, which was the first thing that had been warm all night. The grove went out. Not dark. Out. The oak, the stone, the lantern on the ridge, all of it gone at once, and her standing in a room with no windows and a ceiling of long white tubes, humming. A steel table with a sheet of paper on it. A woman in a white coat, hair pinned up, twenty-two years old, writing on a clipboard. On the pocket of the coat, stitched in blue thread, a name that was not hers. Behind the woman was a window. Behind the window was water. Behind the water, something moved that had a shoulder and no shape to go with it. The woman looked up. Not at the glass. At her. Straight through, the way a mother looks. "Maren," she said. "Don't finish the words." Then the grove was back, and the words were finished, and her palm was stuck to his chest. She could not get her mouth open. "She said it in March," the wolf said. Quiet. "She came up here every month and said it, and every month I told her I would not carry it for her." "Then why." "Because she made me promise to hold it until the words were already out of your mouth. She said you would never forgive her any other way." Up on the ridge, the lantern had stopped. "Good," her uncle said out of the dark. "Now we can begin."