“I know.”
“Bring pain. Hurt.”
“He’ll try,” my mother said, her voice growing harder.
“For me,” Gavin said. “He wants me. Robbie too. Heard him. Gavin, Robbie. Gavin, Robbie. He loves me. Loves Robbie.”
“I’m sure he does in his own way. But sometimes love is poison, and it drips in our ears until our blood runs with it.”
“Bring pain,” he said again, suddenly insistent. “You. Pack. Everyone. I go, he stays away.”
“Do you want to go?”
I couldn’t breathe.
He looked around. At the house behind us. At the blue house behind him. At the dirt road that led away, away, away, and I knew it was pulling at him, whispering for him to run as fast and as far as he could.
But then he turned back around to us, to her. He said, “Thump, thump, thump.”
“What’s that?”
“Heart,” he said. “Carter’s heart.”
“You hear it.”
“Yes.”
“It speaks to you.”
“Yes.”
“What does it say?”
He looked stricken. “Gavin, Gavin, Gavin. Not poison.” And then he went to her, his head bowed. He pressed it against her chest, his arms hanging at his sides. He breathed heavily and shuddered when my mother reached up and put her hands in his hair.
“There you are,” she whispered to him. “Hello, hello. You’re home. So, no. No, Gavin. You aren’t to go away again. We are stronger together than we ever are apart, and this is where you belong.”
it’s platonic/into this river
They left us alone for a time. Kelly and Joe wanted to follow me from room to room like they had when they were kids, but Mom pulled them away, telling them to let us be, at least for a little while.
Gavin was twitchy, like he wanted to shift back to a wolf but was fighting against it. He crowded close as we walked into the house. My throat closed when I first went inside, the scents of home washing over me, embedded into the bones of this old house. The history here was long, and though it wasn’t always good, it was still mine.
Nothing much had changed. It looked as it had the day I left. The door to the office was closed, and I couldn’t make myself open it, remembering how lost I was the last time I’d been inside, recording a video for Kelly and feeling like I was dying.
Gavin followed me up the stairs as I trailed my fingers along the wall.
“It’s all the same,” I said.
“No.”
“No?”
“Louder. Bigger. More.”
I looked back at him. “You’ve never been in here without being a wolf. You seem to be doing okay with the stairs.”
He scowled. “I know how to walk.”