Wolf

Shannon C.F. Rogers

 

The luxury apartment market in Brooklyn has become oversaturated, according to The New York Times Sunday Review.

That makes sense, I think, sinking my teeth into multigrain toast, sweet almond butter coating my tongue. That’s why they’ve been so nice to me since I first came to check out this building. They’re in an arms race. Well, they got me. Two months free rent and a whole year without amenities fees. A gym, a roof deck, and a restaurant-grade kitchen in the “clubhouse,” which can be reserved for parties. A 24-hour doorman and an onsite Lifestyle Director named Brittany, who emails me daily.

Champagne toast in the lobby at 5:30 p.m. Swing by!

All new construction. Wood floors. Great light. I’m the first person to ever live here. It’s clean, the halls are quiet, and the windows are soundproof. It’s the best sleep I’ve ever had.

I barely dream.

Folding my newspaper, I dust the crumbs from my fingertips onto my new plate set. It’s from West Elm. My nails click against my phone screen as I open today’s message from Brittany.

Twilight Yoga Flow in the studio. 7:30 p.m. Namaste!

The yoga instructor is a cute, petite white girl, and she’s wearing the black Ivy Park leggings I want. The ones with the mesh cutouts. I make a mental note to tell Alexa to order them as soon as I get back upstairs to my apartment.

Our instructor dims the lights and invites us to enter Child’s pose. Check in with our breath. Does my mat smell a little like mildew? My nose wrinkles. I’ll have to email Brittany about that.

The heavy door to the yoga studio clicks as someone enters the class late, which is rude. Late person unrolls her mat right next to me. A flash of black toenail polish and a scent like a campfire. It reminds me of something, but what? I’ve read that you should throw away old perfume in order to forget the person you wore it for.

“Deep breath in, through the nose.”

A beginner level flow, which is a little disappointing.

“And come up into Warrior Two.”

I knock over my foam yoga block into Late Person’s space.

“Sorry,” I whisper, reaching for it, as she does. Her fingertips brush mine.

Those eyes. Yellow brown. I’d forgotten them. But in the way you forget a dream. You dream and forget, dream and forget, until you don’t. The hairs on my arms rise.

“It’s okay,” she whispers and hands over the yoga block.

She’s a woman now. Sharp cheekbones and a long neck, but it’s her.

The girl from my backyard, that night. A night when I was 10, and I still lived out there, in the Rio Grande river valley, the edges of the riverbed dry and cracked. In that old house, where sounds passed through walls like air through open doors. My father had been screaming at my mother in the dark, again, but tonight was different. Worse. The air crackled. And then, a shattering. A glass? Soon after, a thump, a heavy thump. Like a body meeting the wall.

I sat up, steel-straight on the bed. Making myself still. Silent. My eyes strained against the darkness, staring at my bedroom door, shut. A glint of moonlight on the doorknob. Holding the air in my lungs. Holding.

Then, I heard my name. Heard it but didn’t hear it, heard it not on the air, but somewhere else. It wasn’t coming from the hallway. I opened my bedroom window, listening.

There it was again.

I follow it, my bare feet landing on gravel and desert thorns, stupid. The moon was coming up and it looked huge against the edge of the eastern mountains. I didn’t like how bright it made things. How bright it made me. I wanted to disappear.

And then, she was there.

I’d never seen her before, and yet she felt as much a part of the yard, and of me, as the Hopa tree. Yellow brown eyes in the dark. Small, brown hands like mine. A round face. I could tell she smelled like unwashed hair. As a car rolled by, beyond the gate, she dropped into a crouch and hid her eyes from the headlights. I grabbed her arm and pulled her into the shadows.

“Come on,” I said, and boosted her up onto a low, thick branch. Rotten crabapples peppered the fine dirt beneath its trunk. We climbed higher until we reached my usual place, a crook obscured by smaller, newer branches. Finally hidden, we watched the moon sliding up into the cold sky.

Who was she, and why would she be out here, all alone?

“Are your parents fighting, too?”

She shrugged, a tremor passing through her as she folded her arms around herself. I wanted to keep her safe but I didn’t know how. Was afraid that I couldn’t. Hesitant, I raised my arm and she nuzzled under it, curling into me, closing her eyes and exhaling. Her shoulders drooped as if releasing a heavy weight. She did smell like unwashed hair. And a campfire.

When I woke up, my fingers were ice, the sun was rising, and she was gone. But at the base of the tree there was a gray wolf. Looking up at me with yellow brown eyes in the flat light of dawn. Sharp. Quiet.

“Is it you?” I asked the wolf.

I knew it was.

“Why did you call me to come outside?”

I knew why she had.

Without a sound, she rose, trotted to our crumbling cinder block wall, leapt over, and was gone. The yard flooded with pink at daybreak and I knew that one day I would move very, very far away from here. That I would never furrow my brow, as my mother did, at the unpaid bills in the overflowing kitchen drawer, crooked and off its track, that I would never sit in the cracked cement driveway, gripping the steering wheel, my face wet, and whisper to myself, “But where would I go?” That I would always have a place to go and that nothing there would be broken.

Now the wolf woman is in my yoga class, in my luxury apartment building in Brooklyn.

“If Crow’s pose is in your practice, you can take it now.”

Dizzy and unfocused, I fall over in Crow’s pose, which I never do.

After class, everyone else moves to thank the teacher with the cute Ivy Park leggings but I follow the yellow-eyed woman out of the studio and into the gym. She’s calling my name again. I can’t hear it but I can feel it. She’s calling my name from her bones to my bones.

Wolf woman weaves through rows and rows of ponytails bouncing on treadmills. She doesn’t turn around.

Wait. The word catches in my throat.

A party is spilling out of the clubhouse with the restaurant-style kitchen. I become tangled in a clutch of gender-reveal balloons, batting away pink ribbons, trying to keep sight of her razor sharp shoulder blades, disappearing down the hallway. I shove between two party guests, laughing, hugging, wearing identical camel coats, soft brown.

Wolf woman has slipped out of the automatic doors and into the night.

“You okay, sweetheart?” the Tuesday doorman asks me.

The glass parts silently, letting me pass.

There are always teenagers smoking weed and skateboarding on the concrete steps next to the canal. Is she with them? I search each of their faces, young and glowing, and feel suddenly old.

Then, there. Her short black hair, thick like fur. Walking along the water. Her fingertips graze the metal railing.

“Wait,” I call out, and she still won’t turn. The moon’s reflection ripples in the black water and I’m running. Why am I running? My face is wet. “Wait!”

She stops short, maybe a hundred feet away, and faces me. I stop, too, my breath heavy, sweat blooming on the nape of my neck. The wolf woman is still and calm like the unbroken water in the canal below. She points with her chin, a gesture that reminds me of home, and I look where she does. Up.

To the light that is on in my window.

Someone is in my apartment.

I know who that someone is and I also know that it’s my fault. I was too embarrassed to tell the Tuesday doorman not to let him up anymore. Peter, my boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend, who threw my hairdryer at me yesterday. He said he was just angry and he didn’t mean it and he wasn’t trying to hit me but I told him to get out and leave his key. And he got out, but he didn’t leave his key, and how could I tell this to the Tuesday doorman? The Tuesday doorman who is too old to be standing behind that podium all day like that, sleeves rolled up, thinking about his country, and his daughter, lifting a shaking hand from a tupperware of red soup. When I come through the glass doors after work, he says, “Welcome home, sweetheart,” even though I am not his daughter and my home is far away.

The Tuesday doorman puts all my stupid, heavy packages in the elevator for me and pushes the number to my floor, floor number 11, which is high enough to have a view of the city and the canal and it’s clean and it has wood floors and no one has lived there before and everything is supposed to be different here, so why isn’t it?

“Where are you from, sweetheart?” I squeezed the new key into my palm until it left a red imprint. Where I’m from is bitter, hits the back of my tongue. Dried peppers that hung in bright bunches in the kitchen window, blocking the view of the broken gate and the dead Chitalpa tree. The way those peppers crackled under knives on the cutting board, the way my mother blended them into a smooth sauce, drizzled it over meat that we chewed at the dinner table, slow, careful, trying to be quiet, trying to watch my father without letting him see we were watching him. Chewing smoke.

Here, I taste everything with the tip of my tongue, sweet. Champagne toast in the lobby. Hand whipped cream from the deli. Foam from the espresso machine. A banana and almond milk protein shake that I sip, lightly, with my yoga mat on my back, on my walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park for sunset yoga. My steps, light. There is no invisible force keeping me pinned to my seat until my plate is licked clean. Everything is perfect. And as the sun dips low over the water, I inhale. Exhale.

Trying to be still. Trying not to let anyone see. Trying to remember that I am free.

Except.

I know I didn’t leave the light on.

And where did she go?

I spin around, slowly, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, searching for the wolf woman, and there’s just the kids laughing and their skateboards smacking the sidewalk, breathing out thin smoke tendrils that wind their way up into the sky. Grasping my elbows, I sink down onto a cool concrete step.

I’ll wait for him to leave. No matter how long it takes. I’ll find a new apartment. I think I read about a new building going up on Atlantic. Yes, it has a cycling studio. New soundproof windows so I can dream and forget.

Dream and repeat and forget.

“Are you okay?”

Black toenail polish, campfire smell. But will she be there to save me, next time? Because there will be a next time, won’t there? My life uncoils before me, tight circles unfolding their repetitions, dreaming and repeating and forgetting.

She lowers herself and sits next to me. The canal below us is deep, opaque. A cool wind pushes through the branches of the trees above us. I don’t know what kinds of trees they are. As she puts her arm around my shoulders, I flinch, because I don’t deserve it, because I didn’t try hard enough to make things different, because I didn’t go far enough away, because I left my mother behind.

But she pulls me in tighter. Keeping me. Keeping me anyway.

She sits with me there for a long time, the wolf woman.

Long enough that I begin to imagine the breaking of the circle. A different dawn.

That night, I dream.

 

Shannon C.F. Rogers grew up in Albuquerque, N.M., and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her work has appeared in Bodega Magazine and on stage with Tricklock Company and Lady Luck Productions. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico and is currently pursuing her MFA in Writing For Young People at Antioch University Los Angeles.