Right now, I can smell the sting of anxiety on her. It reminds me of trying a spoonful of vanilla extract and discovering its taste is purely alcohol. It rebuffs the warmth of its essence.
Clearly the kitchen incident is still on her mind as well. Her cheeks flush as her eyes meet mine, and she quickly looks at the ground again. “You startled me.”
“Sorry about that. I didn’t think anyone would be up here.” I sigh, ready to just leave and forget all this. I feel like I need to keep apologizing. “Um, before, in the kitchen—”
“We don’t need to talk about that,” she cuts me off quickly. I nod and jam my hands in my pockets. Right.
I glance to the faint moon starting to rise in the evening sky, feeling its presence start to heat my blood, waking the wolf. I swallow and take a step back from her.
“Do you maybe want a light on?” I ask, glancing around for one. My hand finds the antique switch plate. The wall sconces don’t turn on when I flip them.
“I tried it earlier. I think these lightbulbs burned out a while ago,” she sighs, before her eyes fall back on the wall where she was staring before.
The wall is full of family photos, and unlike downstairs, there are a few that still include me with my brothers. We’re all baby-faced and in various states of childish gangly-ness and endless grass-stained knees.
The frames are all heavy with dust, set up to trace the family lineage the further down the hall they go. Photos of Mom and Dad become younger, the photos of my brothers and me playing in the dirt become each of us as babies in her arms, to the one of her and Dad on the steps of a church, leaving their wedding.
I get to the place Elise has been standing, staring. There’s a number of pictures of my mom, barely nineteen, standing with her older sister in front of a number of suitcases. The strong resemblance between them remains even with the shaking disposable camera it was taken with.
I can only imagine what is going through Elise’s mind. She’d been an only child and her parents had quickly gotten divorced. Looking at our pictures, she probably sees the sort of big happy family she always wanted for herself.
“The nice thing about weddings is they get to be little family reunions, I guess,” Elise says, nodding to them with a wistfulsigh and a face full of misplaced nostalgia, “What’s Deanna’s sister like?”
“I don’t know.”
Her brow pinches as she looks at me. I hate to disillusion her of her fantasy, that a family can be the sum of its happy snapshots. Maybe that happy families can exist.
“That’s not Laura’s mom?”
“No, Laura’s mom is Aunt Jenny, she’s from my dad’s side of the family. You might see her at the wedding. In the picture is my Aunt Danielle. She died before I was born,” I say. “We don’t talk about it much.”
The crease between her brows deepens. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s ok. You couldn’t have known.”
I can tell she wants the full story but isn’t willing to ask.
It’s just one of the many things I can’t tell her the whole truth behind, even the pieces that I do have. I’ve gathered some details from other family members, little pieces that fall to the side that were somehow the most important.
Maybe it’s the root of everything we were supposed to keep secret. Elise never understood why I couldn’t bring her home to my family, and what we were afraid of happening.
“It doesn’t sound half so scandalous now, I suppose. Danielle wasn’t supposed to have a boyfriend, but she did, and they were caught fooling around. Teenagers in the seventies, I mean, who would have guessed? There was some fear she’d get pregnant, and it would ruin both their futures. Their parents agreed to separate them.”
For most wolf packs, going feral is at most an urban legend. And that legend is always about a wolf becoming estranged from their pack, or losing their mate, who in turn loses the will to turn back, often becoming mad with unchecked bloodlust.
It largely depends on who tells the story.
“She was pretty heartbroken. At the time, there were a lot of reports about a wolf being seen in the area, attacking farm animals, pets, you name it. Danielle started hiking all the trails alone. One day she didn’t come back, and they filed a missing person’s report.”
The way my mom tells it, there was another werewolf family her parents had been trying to arrange a match for Danielle with, even though she had insisted she’d found her mate. They hadn’t believed her.
“There are some dots there you could probably connect if you wanted to. Mom’s never cared to speculate, though.”
Mom never had to say it for us to know that she blamed herself for keeping her sister’s secret as long as she did. I know she blames me for leaving when I should have known better.
“Sometimes it’s just easiest to say that my mom likes to keep her family close.” I sigh. “I don’t mean to resurrect old arguments, but...there are a lot of answers you deserved, that I still don’t know how to give you.”
I know exactly the words to use, but my jaw welds shut on them.My mom’s every parenting decision is entirely influenced by her sister’s death.
