Clark dialed Gillian’s phone number. He stumbled over it a couple times, then finally got it right. Let Gillian answer. If it was Gillian that answered, he could hold himself together.
The phone rang three, four times, then picked up. “Peakson’s.”
It was her. Clark had to blink back tears. Her voice was so beautiful and this was the first time in a long time that he was hearing it with his ears, his own ears, and no wolf at all between the sound of her and him.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
Clark spoke up, his voice catching a bit. “Hello, Gillian. It’s—it’s Clark.”
“Clark. Oh… oh.” There was the sound of something being set down, heavily. A child squealed in the background, a young child. It was a happy sound. “What do you want?”
I want to tell you everything. I want to hold you again, and love you like I did once. I want to be your husband again. But Clark said, “I just called to talk a bit.”
Her voice was savage and rough when she spoke again. “You cannot see him, Clark. Don’t ask, I’m not going to put Terry through that. Not again.”
“I’m not going to ask that, Gillian. I just wanted to talk a bit, is all.” But now that she’d said that he couldn’t ask to see Terry, that was the only thing that he could think to talk about. So he was quiet, listening the child’s babbling in the background. He could hear a kid’s television program running, too, a squeaky, merry cacophony.
Gillian said, “Well? Where are you living now?”
Too far away from you. “Arizona. Middle of nowhere, really.”
She sighed, and sounded a bit relieved. He knew why—it was safer that way. Safer in Arizona, because it was far away from South Carolina where she and Terry and her new husband lived; safer in the middle of nowhere, because he was far away from everyone else.
“Do you need anything? Money?”
She always asked him that. “No. I pick up a bit of work, here and there.” When they were first separated, he’d called her up often, begging for some money. Begging for other things, too. A chance to see Terry, a chance to see her. “I get by.”
“Good.” A pause. “So. What kind of work?”
“Construction, mostly. I’ve been working in the library, too. Some.” He cleared his throat. “How is he?”
Gillian sighed. The child in the background had fallen silent. “Why do you do this to yourself, Clark?”
“Terry’s my son, Gillian.” As if that was an answer.
“He’s fine.”
“That’s it?”
She sounded exasperated. “What do you want to know, Clark?”
Everything. But he just said, “He’s still my son.” Even though it had been eight years since she’d sent him a picture, ten since he’d held Terry. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you two. I miss you.”
“Oh, Clark.” A long pause. “He’s got a girlfriend. He doesn’t know that I know.”
“Who is it?”
“A girl from church. She’s thirteen.”
“She’s too young.”
“Richard and I are going to talk to him tonight.” She trailed off.
Richard. The man who’d taken Clark’s place. Taken his family. Clark bit his lip. He’d given up his family to Richard Peakson. Gillian and Terry had taken Richard’s name, replaced Trost with Peakson.
“Do you ever talk to Terry about me?” Clark asked.
“He remembers you, some.”
“That’s not what I asked, Gillian.”
“No. Clark, it’s…painful. And it’s a long way in the past for both of us.”
“Both of us?”
“Terry and me, I mean.”
For them. The us he wasn’t a part of any longer.
“Clark? You still there?” Gillian sounded concerned.
“Yes. How’s he doing in school?”
“Fair. He goes to vocational ed for half the day.”
“Vocational ed?”
“Don’t take that tone, Clark. He’s just not… bookish. He hates sitting still.”
“What tone? I don’t have a tone.”
“You do, too. It’s the one you always have when you call, the one that says, ‘Gillian you could be doing better.’”
The concern had melted away. She sounded angry again. Clark said, “I don’t have a tone. I just want to know why you and Richard don’t try to convince him to do better in regular school.”
“Because we’ve seen how he hates it there, Clark! Ugh, this is stupid! You’re gone from our lives for, what, ten years now, you only call once or twice a year, and you actually think you have the right to care about us?”
“Caring about you isn’t a… a right, Gillian, it’s natural. He’s my son, and you’re my wife, and I’m just supposed to forget about you?”
“Was. I was your wife.”
“I know that.”
“You said ‘you’re my wife.’”
“You know what I meant,” Clark said after a second.
“You said what you meant. It’s been ten years, Clark. You’ve got to get over us.”
Familiar territory. Like offering him money every time he called. That didn’t make it hurt any less. He knew he couldn’t see Terry again, and even the idea of talking to his son made him shake and his heart stutter. But to be cut off from them like this was worse. “I can’t,” he said.
Gillian sucked in a breath. “You can’t. You can’t. Well, this is a familiar line of conversation. Clark, he still has nightmares. He still wets the bed. Fifteen years old, he still wets the bed. Because you—“
“I know what I did, Gillian.”
“No you don’t. If you knew, you’d never dream of calling him again.”
“I called you.”
“He keeps a picture of that stupid dog beneath his pillow. I don’t even think he realizes why he does it anymore, but every time he wakes up screaming from one of his nightmares, he’s holding the picture of that dumb mutt you murdered.”
Clark whimpered. “Don’t Gillian.”
“Why not, Clark? Ten years, you still can’t live up to the fact that you mutilated Terry’s dog? Right in front of him?”
Not me, the wolf, the wolf…
She was crying now, and the child he’d heard before was whimpering too, whimpering “Mama, mama,” and it sounded so much like Terry, Clark felt his heart breaking.
“Stop calling us, Clark,” Gillian said. She was sobbing and her voice was fierce and rushed. “Just…forget us. Leave us alone. That’s the best thing, and you know it. It would be better if he didn’t love you, that’s why you have to stay away, Clark. Don’t call us again, please.”
“You always say that,” he said, but she had already hung up.
He pressed redial, but the tone rang busy. Clark put the phone back on the hook, and realized that his other hand was tracing the motorcycle’s outline on the window pane. He moved away and stuck his hand in his pocket.
Terry’s fifteenth birthday was two months ago. Clark had gone into town to buy him a birthday card, but they’d all seemed too babyish. Steam-trains and airplanes whirring around balloons of insipid verse. Clark had settled on a postcard of the Grand Canyon, but in the end, couldn’t manage to write even a single word. He’d sent it unsigned.
He shouldn’t be afraid of his son, of what he’d done ten years ago. The wolf was trapped in the Sport Scout, wasn’t it? He was cured.