I Hold a Wolf by the Ears Read online

  But I’ll tell you anyway.

  Right when I was thinking I might drop the stick and reach for him, to say that eventually he would make it through this period of grief or at least present a case for it being too early in our marriage to seriously consider murder, he slung his arms and legs around the tree trunk. He began to climb fast toward the top. I yanked the bottom of his pant leg; he shook me loose. I ran circles around the base like an agitated dog, yelping his name. I tried to climb after him, but kept sliding down the trunk—and the moment I found a nub to rest my foot on, something to help propel me upward, an inner voice commanded: Stop. So I stood back. I watched his white hands clutch and claw. I watched his toes find the wood knots, points on a map he’d never forgotten. Once he was in the dark bramble of the canopy his body vanished. I waited for a long time, well past nightfall, but he never came down.

  I walked out of the Pitch and, in the years that followed, wrote and illustrated a book about a little boy whose dead mother communicates with him through a tree in the woods behind their house. She tells her sad son wise and soothing things. The book was a great success. Very popular with the freshly grieved. This is a gentle lie, I did not tell the half-orphaned children in signing lines. This tree wants nothing more than to destroy your life. I marveled at the story I had gotten so many people to believe. And then one day I got a call from a number in New York City—at long last, I was told, I had won my prize.

  VOLCANO HOUSE

  I. THE BULLET

  I went to Iceland to see a volcano. Instead the tour guide took us to Volcano House, where images of gushing lava and smoking craters played on a movie screen. My sister said it was almost as good as the real thing. This was in Reykjavik, on a broad street near the port. Outside I could smell the rot of fish and salt.

  At Volcano House, we watched footage of Eyjafjallajökull. Rocks with tails of white smoke and red embers shot out of a black sky, arcing like fireworks. During a re-creation of the Heimaey eruption, we learned the occupants of the island smoldering before us escaped by boat. After the movie, we examined igneous rock—obsidian, basalt, mica—in glass cases. Some of the rocks were as large as a human head. I wanted to pick up one of those human-head-size rocks and roll it down the street or bash it against a wall. In the gift shop, glass vials of volcanic ash were available for purchase. I bought one. My sister did not.

  * * *

  My sister and I are twins, but not the identical kind. Still there is a sameness in the slope of our cheekbones, in the dark blue of our irises. “Like lake water,” her husband, Pat, told us once.

  * * *

  On the twelfth of November, four months after Iceland, my sister is running in Baxter Woods, a nature preserve in Portland, Maine. On that same day a man named John Evans enters the preserve dressed as a jogger, in sweatpants and sneakers. Inside he opens fire with a Glock 17, killing seven people, wounding ten. He is apprehended by the police on Route 1, near Falmouth.

  This is what Pat tells me when he calls from the trauma center. I’m still in bed when the phone rings. I sit up. The covers make a puddle at my waist. He tells me the bullet is lodged in her cerebellum. She is in a coma. In the background I hear the hospital intercom, the sound of some important person being paged. “Slow down,” I tell him before I realize this moment, like a bullet, is not something that can be slowed down.

  I drive five hours from upstate New York to Portland. I don’t listen to music. The windows stay closed. I think about the quake in Pat’s voice. About all those people cramming themselves into boats and rowing away from Heimaey, into the unknowable night. At the trauma center, I rush into the cool antiseptic air, down white hall after white hall, until I find Pat by a nurse’s station, tall and spectral under the fluorescent lights.

  * * *

  Her body was found in the woods surrounding the trails, which meant she must have heard the gunshots before John Evans came for her, must have been trying to get away. She was wearing a hot pink windbreaker. In the hallway, Pat grabs onto my shoulder, his fingers digging into my sweater, and leans. We don’t talk about how the bright color of her windbreaker likely made it easier for John Evans to see her through the trees.

  When the doctor shows us the CT scan, the bullet looks like a tiny egg trapped in her skull.

  * * *

  In Portland, in my sister’s condo, her usual mug—the one with a Snellen chart printed on the side, a gift from a patient—is still on the kitchen counter, the white bottom ringed with coffee. I’ve always thought of her as the anchor: predictable, stationary. A point on the map I could return to. Her datebook is open on the dining room table. I peer down at the entries done in careful red pen. All of a sudden I feel like an interloper.

  “As long as you like,” Pat says as he carries my backpack into the guest room. It’s never been just the two of us before. I sit on the bed and think about how sometimes it was hard being her sister. If she was the anchor, being around her made me feel like air—transparent, insubstantial.

  I do not feel like air when I see her now.

  * * *

  Our hotel in Iceland was called the Borg and it looked like a white castle. Some of the rooms—though not ours—overlooked Austurvöllur, a large park with a bronze statue in the center. It was July and at night we kept the draperies open, flooding our room with milky light. I felt like we were living inside a single continuous day, a day that would last forever, which made me feel like we would last forever too.

  * * *

  After a month in the trauma center and no improvement, she is moved to a long-term care facility in Augusta. She is awake, in the medical sense of the word, but she is not aware. She can breathe on her own, but she cannot talk. She cannot hear us talking to her. Tubes carry fluids in and out of her body. Without these tubes, she will die. Pat works in real estate and business is booming in Portland, the once sleepy port city now flooded with deep-pocketed buyers from Boston and Manhattan. In upstate New York, I work in a copy shop owned by two Russian brothers; I ask to cut my days and start going to Maine every week to help. Once in a while my sister opens her eyes, and we watch one deep blue iris drift up to the ceiling, the other toward the door.

  * * *

  I bring the vial of ash to her bedside. The glass is warm from the heat of my hands. “Do you remember?” I ask her. The walls are the color of canned peas. A window looks out on a desolate parking lot. Her right pinkie twitches on the thin white blanket. The ash smells like nothing. I bend down and massage a bit into her arm.

  * * *

  In the condo, Pat and I watch the local news, the eleven o’clock edition. “John Evans, John Evans,” the reporters keep saying, and then we are startled to see our own faces on TV: a wavy image of us leaving the trauma center, heads bowed, arms around each other.

  * * *

  I start playing a game with my sister where I pretend she has telepathic powers.

  “What am I thinking now?” I ask, out loud if we are alone, silently if Pat is there. Today, alone, I ask the question twice and watch for a reaction: a blink, a twitch. We have been encouraged to not read into these little movements.

  “You’re right, as usual. Of course I was thinking about the bay.”

  Imagine this: the three of us spilling from the condo late one night, wine-drunk. Two days before Iceland. We followed the sandy trail down to East End Beach. We decided to go into the water. It was too dark to see anything but shapes: swells of breast and belly, long lines of torso and leg. We left our clothes heaped in the sand.

  My sister went in first. Pat followed. The moon dropped a net of light over the water, and I watched his high white ass disappear into the bay. Earlier I tried to explain to my sister how life felt like circling a giant dome, knocking and knocking on the smooth shell, searching for the door. Real life was happening in there, I was sure—if only I could find my way inside.

  “Happiness is a choice,” she said, and I hated her a little for talking like that.

  In the b
ay, I caught up to my sister. I dove underwater, into the vast cold, and found her ankle. I wrapped my hand around it and squeezed.

  “What’s your problem?” she said when I surfaced. “You scared me half to death.”

  “Boo!” I said, splashing. “Look who still can’t take a fucking joke.”

  “Break it up over there,” said Pat.

  II. THE MURDER ROOM

  The day after Volcano House, we went to Thingvellir, a national park. For the first part of the drive, the guide regaled us with a ghost story about a deacon and his horse. The deacon was engaged to a woman who lived on the opposite side of a river and when he was riding over to see her one winter the ice broke and the deacon died. On Christmas Eve, his fiancée, not yet informed of the deacon’s death, answered the door to find the deacon’s horse and the deacon himself. Together they rode off and it wasn’t until they were in the moonlight that she realized the deacon was a skeleton, his skull as bare and white as moon rock. The deacon stopped at a cemetery and attempted to drag his fiancée into an open grave, but she managed to escape to a church and was spared, or so she thought, because apparently the deacon’s ghost continued to haunt her every day after, a matter that was resolved only with the help of a sorcerer.

  “The deacon supports my theory that matrimony is a dangerous and antiquated institution,” I told my sister after the story was over.

  “If only you had warned me.” She leaned into my shoulder and I smelled the lavender hair oil she’d used since college.

  The bus passed through a town called Mosfellsbær, moving north.

  “If we can travel an hour to see a park, I don’t see why we can’t visit a volcano,” I said.

  “Give it a rest,” she replied. “That movie was pretty good.”

  The first time I read about Iceland, the landscape sounded so foreign: neighbor to the North Pole, night-washed winters, light-bleached summers. It seemed like a place that must be terribly far away, but the flight from New York took less time than flying to California.

  I looked around at the other passengers. An older couple had fallen asleep, hands crumpled in their laps. A woman in a blue visor read a paperback mystery. A man studied a map of Iceland with intent. I felt a growing emptiness, spreading out inside me like a sea. I stared out at the passing landscape, startled by the absence of trees.

  * * *

  Every evening, my sister called Pat from our hotel room. I listened to her describe the tart Icelandic yogurt and the alien grace of the swans in Tjörnin Pond. Impressions she never thought to share with me. A sonogram photo of us nestled in the womb: the kiss of her translucent lips, our miniature fists, curled and touching—how to return to that place? I had suggested the trip, even though I knew I would need to ask my sister to cover most of my share, with the promise that I would pay her back, a promise we both understood I wouldn’t be able to fulfill anytime soon. Still, I wanted to see if it was possible for us to learn to act like sisters, if the chemistry between us could be changed.

  In Iceland, I was thirty-seven, right around the age when you start to feel a need to account for how you’ve been spending your life. I thought that if I couldn’t have a spouse to call or a permanent address or a dedicated vocation, I could at least see a volcano.

  * * *

  At the visitor center, we watched a video on the history of Thingvellir. Next the guide brought us to a lookout, where we gazed at ragged lava cliffs, at rifts that cut through valleys like stone rivers, at a dark distant lake bordered by low mountains, the peaks fringed with snow.

  After the lookout, we followed the guide to a steep footpath. She explained about the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which ran the length of the ocean. Almannagjá was the North American border; the Heiðargjá fault, to the east, the Eurasian one. These tectonic borders were separating. Every year the distance between the faults grew larger.

  “This land might be ancient, but it has never been more alive,” the guide said. “It is changing all the time.”

  The path through the Almannagjá was bordered by hulking ridges. Damp green moss oozed from rough crevices. As we descended deeper, a fog rolled into the gorge. The path narrowed. Patches of white lichen turned luminescent. We passed a section where the rock was coated in a peculiar grass, gray and hair-like. The man walking beside me was recording our journey on a small camcorder.

  “I’ve almost got it,” he kept saying.

  * * *

  That summer, it seemed like planes were always going missing. A plane vanished into the Pacific two hours after departing from Beijing. Found eventually, in pieces. A dozen planes disappeared from radars for twenty minutes in Canada. What was happening in the atmosphere? On the flight to Iceland, I got the window seat. The longer I watched the sky, the more each turbulent shudder felt like a prelude to a larger disturbance. My sister slept through everything. “Wake up,” I would say if we were on that plane together now.

  * * *

  I pissed behind a mossy boulder. Too much coffee at the Borg, too much water on the bus. I tried to tell my sister where I was going, but I was walking behind her and the wind was thunderous and she wouldn’t turn around. I squatted and felt the cool air against my thighs. I wiped with a crumpled paper napkin I dug up from my backpack.

  When I returned to the path, the group was gone. A cold drizzle started. I continued down the Almannagjá. A red fox scrambled over the edge of the ridge. I touched a patch of lichen the color of egg yolk. I noticed indigo clusters of wildflowers and an orange weed, the branches as delicate as a finger of coral. The rain fell harder. I kept walking, my backpack raised over my head. I felt the ground tremble, heard the rush of water. Suddenly I remembered the guide telling us we could only go so far into the Almannagjá because recent earthquakes had caused fissures in the landscape, breaking the path. I imagined craters opening like wounds in the earth.

  * * *

  Alone with my sister, I recite facts about volcanoes. I checked out a book called Eruption! from the Portland Public Library, a book I know I will never return: it is now an artifact of the After. I tell her the Volcanic Explosivity Index runs from 0 to 8. A 3 is classified as a “Vulcanian.” An 8 is an “Ultra-Plinian,” which in plain English means Holy Shit. Volcanoes exist on the ocean floor. The largest known volcano is not on Earth, but on Mars. A volcano can go extinct.

  * * *

  An index for comas exists too.

  * * *

  The echo of voices, the crunch of footsteps. Distant yellow ponchos weaving through the mist. It was the tour group, moving toward the top of the path. Where had they come from? I trotted over and fell into line, hoping to avoid a reprimand from the guide. Everyone was calling out for something, but the wind made it impossible to understand. It always seemed to be windy in Iceland.

  A yellow body spun around and there was my sister, her face damp with rain. My body went airy with relief. I smiled at her and said, “Ég þarf kaffi,” the only bit of Icelandic I had learned. She grabbed my hand and raised it toward the sky. Her skin was wet and cold. “She’s here,” she shouted. “She’s right here.” The trail of bodies stopped and turned, the white beams of flashlights spilling down the path and over the edges of the Almannagjá.

  We were quiet on the bus back to Reykjavik. We sat in separate rows. “I’m missing?” I’d cried after she filled me in. I’d been away from the group for too long. There had been a panic, a call placed to the visitor center, the start of a search. “You never know what’s going on,” she’d shouted on the path. The man in the row across from me was once again studying his map of Iceland with the intensity of a person planning an invasion or an escape.

  * * *

  After Thingvellir, the guide marched us from the Borg to Laugavegur for a “rúntur.” Of course, we were getting the tourist’s version, the one that sidestepped any chaos or mess. We sat in a pub with a glossy oak bar and framed photos of large, handsome ships on the walls. We drank expensive Icelandic beer.

  “I still don’t und
erstand how you got so confused,” my sister said. “A search party and you weren’t even missing! Wait until I tell Pat.” Already I could hear her on the phone, chattering away like I wasn’t even in the room.

  When the guide announced it was time to go, I stayed planted in my chair.

  My sister checked her watch. “We leave for the whale watch at seven tomorrow.”

  “A sitting cow starves. Isn’t that what they say in Iceland?” I was repeating a proverb mentioned during a tour of Árbær, an open-air museum meant to re-create the old way of life in Reykjavik. I thought the saying had to do with the importance of initiative, of forward thinking, but truthfully I could no longer recall the exact meaning. We were joined by Tom, the man who was so preoccupied with the map on the bus and who possessed a chilly beauty—a slim nose, a plump, sullen mouth—I was just beginning to notice. The group left us. He spread his map out on the table. The southern edge of Iceland was stained with red jam.

  Two more rounds, a change in scenery. I told my sister that she could go back to the Borg, that Tom and I would be just fine on our own, but she laughed and asked how she could trust me to navigate an unfamiliar city after what had happened at Thingvellir. The three of us tumbled into the gray stone streets, into the endless light. I couldn’t see the sun, but the sky was radiant, like the sun had melted and now it was in every particle. People were wearing sunglasses, even though it was almost midnight. White seagulls circled overhead.