Pancakes and Hush

You don't remember falling asleep. You remember the phone on your chest, the screen going dark and lighting again, his short lowercase lines arriving every few minutes until the sky over the ridge went gray. You remember typing yes, come to breakfast and staring at it for a full minute before you pressed send.

At six-fifteen he is on the sidewalk outside the Gold Pan in a clean shirt, hair wet, holding a paper bag from the Kwik Stop like a shield.

"You sure about this, Ava?" Mags asks, one hand on the lock.

You're not. You nod anyway.

Mags lets him in. She looks him up and down, all six foot four of him, and says, "Well. You're a big one."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You going to break my booths?"

"I'll sit on the floor."

"Don't be smart." But the corner of her mouth twitches. She points at the corner booth. "Coffee's hot. Keep your hands where I can see them. I have a shotgun under that counter I've been looking for an excuse to use since 1986."

"Understood." He sits. He doesn't touch the coffee. He's looking at the back stairs.

You come down them holding two hands.

You talked to the twins in the bathroom while they brushed their teeth. You kept it simple, because you've had six years to plan this conversation and you still don't have the words. The big man from yesterday is a friend of Mama's. From before. From the place with the lake. Bodie wanted to know if he was a wolf. You said yes. Bodie said cool with his mouth full of toothpaste. Elke said nothing at all, which is worse.

Now Bodie drops your hand and marches straight to the booth.

"You're the singing man," he says.

Torben goes very still, the way you'd go still if a deer walked up to you. "I am."

"You sang to Elke. She was being a baby about it."

"I was not," says Elke, from behind your leg.

"You were. You cried." Bodie climbs into the booth across from Torben without being asked and kneels on the seat so he's taller. "Are you a really big wolf? Like, as big as a car?"

"Not as big as a car."

"As big as a horse?"

Torben considers it seriously. "A small horse."

"Whoa." Bodie turns to you, scandalized. "Mama. A small horse."

"I heard, baby."

"What color?"

"Black."

"Like Elke's hair."

"Yes." Torben's voice does something on the word. He clears his throat. "Like Elke's hair."

You slide into the booth beside Bodie. Elke stays standing at the end of the table, studying Torben the way she studies her spelling words, like he might be a trick.

He doesn't reach for her. He doesn't smile too big. He just looks back, steady and gentle, and waits.

After a long moment Elke digs in the pocket of her overalls, pulls out a crumpled square of construction paper with 1 LEMONAID written on it in Bodie's handwriting, and slaps it on the table in front of him.

"You didn't get one yesterday," she says. "You left."

"I did." His big hand covers the paper as if it's made of gold leaf. "I'm sorry I left."

"Mama said you're from the lake place."

"I am."

"Is it nice?"

"It's cold," he says. "And it's beautiful. And it's very quiet." He pauses. "It's been too quiet for a long time."

Elke thinks about this. Then she climbs into the booth beside you, on the far side from him, and steals a piece of your toast. That's it. That's the whole verdict. But you see Torben's chest rise and fall like he's just set something very heavy down.

Mags brings pancakes. Bodie talks for twenty minutes straight about trucks, worms, whether wolves can eat pancakes (yes), whether wolves can eat worms (also yes, Torben admits, which delights him), and a boy named Milo in his class who says he can burp the alphabet. Torben listens to every word of it as if it's a briefing from the governor.

Once, when Bodie isn't looking, he puts his fingertip on the table next to your hand. Not touching. Just close.

You don't move your hand away.

When Mags has walked them to the kindergarten on Church Street, you take him into the pantry.

You've never shown anyone. Not Mags, not Keir. You reach to the top shelf and bring down the empty mason jar with the gray-green ring at the bottom and the card tucked behind it, and you hold them out to him.

"This," you say. "Every new moon for six years. I found the plant on the ridge above town. I steeped it like the card says. I drank it. I never missed." You swallow. "Until this month. The fire took the meadow."

He doesn't take the jar. He leans down and breathes over the open mouth of it.

All the color leaves his face.

"Hush," he says. "This is hush."

"That's what he called it."

"Nobody brews this." He straightens slowly. "Nobody knows how to brew this. It's in the old lore. Moonsedge at the new moon, steeped in iron and silver. The recipe is in the Keeper's rolls in the council vault. It was used, two hundred years ago, to hide a mate from a rival pack in wartime. It's been forbidden since my great-great-grandfather's day because of what it does." His eyes lift to yours. "It doesn't hide a bond, Ava. It makes it go dark. Completely. On the other end, you can't tell it apart from death."

You knew. Somewhere you always knew. You still put your hand on the pantry shelf to stay upright.

"I felt you die," he says. "Eleven forty. On the Greywold road."

"I drank it at eleven."

"It takes about forty minutes to work." He says it flatly, like a man reading a dosage off a bottle, and you watch him do the arithmetic and hate the answer. "Whoever gave you this knew exactly what I'd feel. And exactly when."

"He said it would keep you from following me."

"It kept me from looking for you." His voice drops. "A man whose mate runs away searches every bus station in America. A man whose mate dies..." He stops. "I didn't search. I buried a box."

You can't breathe in the little pantry. It smells of flour and cinnamon and him.

He takes the recipe card from behind the jar, carefully, by the edges, and turns it over in the light from the doorway. He studies the slanted handwriting for a long time. You can see something moving behind his eyes, something he isn't saying yet.

"Torben?"

"Not here." He tucks the card into his shirt pocket. When he looks at you again, his eyes have that thin ring of gold burning around the pupil, the wolf right at the surface. "There's a box in my truck."

"What kind of box?"

"Six years," he says. "I've never shown anyone what's in it. Not Jess. Not Pieter." He holds out his hand, palm up, and waits. "I need you to see it."