Sheckley, Alyssa - The Better to Hold You.html Read online

  “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.

  ELEVEN

  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.

  TWELVE

  I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw the restaurant. It was the kind of place where one person fills your water glass and another removes your used dishes, and neither is the waiter. The hostess who showed me to my table was slight and gamine in a black evening dress with no bra. She gave Hunter a sympathetic smile as she gestured to my chair with one elegant little hand.

  “Hunter,” I said, “you didn't warn me that we were going somewhere this nice.” I'd thought we'd have my deferred birthday dinner at one of those casually trendy West Side places where it's chic to be underdressed. Instead, Hunter had managed to book us at one of those East Side places where terrifyingly thin women make a career out of eating squab. My husband, who had dressed up in a pale pink, button-down shirt and black jeans, was the only man not wearing a tie, but on him it looked deliberate and stylish. The other male diners were florid-faced and stout, drinking scotch and lecturing their ash blond, stiletto-shod companions.

  I, on the other hand, was trying to remember not to touch my hair, which was on that knife's edge between passably clean and suspiciously shiny. I was wearing Lilliana's too-small spare black sweater because a terrified Lhasa apso had defecated on my lavender cardigan right before lunchtime. I'd also borrowed some lipstick, but it hadn't helped matters much. Fatigue was making my contact lenses feel like scouring pads and I was getting a nervous rash on the right side of my forehead, near the scalp. All in all, I wished I were at home, eating tomato soup out of a can. But my husband and I had a date, so there I was, like a boxer struggling to stay in the fight.

  “You look great.”

  I raised one eyebrow.

  “Mm. Just like a Victorian nanny.” Hunter pulled out my chair for me, beating the waiter to the job. Or was it the busboy? Whoever the man was, I thought he glared at us as Hunter sat back down. “Ah, there you are. Gin and tonic for me, champagne cocktail for the lady.” The mystery server gave a polite nod, possibly recognizing Hunter as one of those rare diners who immediately assumes the dominant role.

  “I look like a Victorian nanny? How is that?”

  Hunter grinned at me. “The hank of hair barely restrained by a tortoiseshell spear. The flare of nostril. The haughty arch of unplucked eyebrows.”

  “The furry legs?”

  “Thankfully, you are not Victorian in all respects.”

  I put my hand to my chest. “Stop, I'm getting a swelled head.”

  “Don't fish for it—you know you're beautiful. And, as I was going to say before you interrupted me, it's the air you have of something deliciously repressed.” You know you're beautiful, he'd said, so matter-of-fact. I inhaled a deep lungful of happiness, the inverse of a sigh. The real waiter came with our menus, and Hunter thanked him.

  “My name is Pascal, and I'll be your server to night.” I noticed that Pascal seemed to approve of Hunter more than he did of me. I couldn't really argue with the guy: Hunter had recently gotten a haircut and it fell in smooth waves around his high cheekbones. He looked expensive and dangerous, like he could drive a Porsche while dismantling a bomb barehanded. Barehanded, as in missing the thin silver wedding ring he usually wore when he wasn't out in the wilderness courting disaste
r.

  “You're not wearing your ring.” I'd bought it as a joke at a flea market, sure Hunter would refuse to wear anything other than a watch. To my surprise, he'd taken to it, saying he liked the idea of being branded.

  “What? Oh, that. Must've got out of the habit of wearing it. I'll put it on when we get back home.” Hunter reached for my hand across the table, but just as I placed my palm over his, Pascal returned with the drinks.

  “Monsieur. Madame.” My hand was released so abruptly it just sat there for a moment on the table like a dead fish. “I'll be back to tell you the specials.”

  I sipped my champagne and looked at the menu, which was printed on parchment and vellum, like a wedding announcement. To my surprise, there seemed to be nothing offered that did not contain some dead thing in its ingredients. Salad of fresh greens with goat cheese and crisp apple-cured bacon. Duck and mushroom ravioli. Even the vegetable soup had pork won-tons in it.

  “Hunter,” I said, “there's nothing I can eat here.”

  “Hmm.” Hunter looked up at me. “There's salad and stuff. Cheese.”

  “It all has meat in it.”

  “For God's sake, Abra, we're not in college anymore. You don't have to be such a purist. Just pick the bits you don't want out.”

  I stared at him, thinking of the Dalmatian. Drop eye contact now, I thought, to avoid the lunge. But instead I attacked. “I don't think it's very considerate of you to pick a restaurant that doesn't have any vegetarian dishes, Hunter. Especially when you're supposed to be taking me out for my birthday.”

  There was a pause, and then Hunter reached over the table for my hand. “You're right. I'm sorry, Abs. I just heard about this place from a friend at Vanity Fair, and I thought … But, you're right. Do you want to leave?”

  Unfair, I thought. He knows how I hate making a scene. And leaving here would entail a little drama worthy of my mother. “No,” I said. Grudgingly.