OF WOLVES

The gall bladder, Candy said, is left of the pancreas.

Gall bladder, pancreas. Gall bladder, pancreas. The pancreas was right, so the gall bladder left, Candy said and said again. She saw the body parts with faces and legs and arms and hands that the gall bladder, angry as he was, balled into fists and shook at the pancreas. I’ve had it up to here with you!

Mnemonic devices. Mind cartoons. This was what Candy had been reduced to. She gritted her teeth until they squeaked. She used to memorize things—license plates, for instance—without even trying. See it to know it, her father had said. That’s my Candy.

But she wasn’t his Candy anymore. She was forty now, and nothing came easy.

The frog in the tray was starting to smell. Candy gripped the tweezers, but her hand shook. She pushed up the sleeve of her robe and grabbed her own wrist, dug her thumb into the meat between the thin bones until her fingers went numb.

Gall bladder, pancreas. Pancreas says, I’m outta here! I’m through with you! Sayonara, gall!

Just slow down, Marty said. He was mumbling, but Candy could understand. Tell me what happened.

Marty was still in bed. He was still in his boxer shorts. He was still asleep.

Candy, at her vanity, dug at the frog. Gall bladder says, Beat it then! See if I care!

She glanced up at the mirror, but Marty’s eyes were closed. His mouth was smashed open against the pillow, so that his tongue showed pink and wet.

Candy went back to the frog. Adios, muchacho!

There was a time when Candy’s mother Sue had tried to explain her daughter, mostly to teachers who were, they said, simply voicing their concerns. Candy tries too hard sometimes, Sue would say. That’s her problem. She just wants everything to be perfect.

In many ways, Sue didn’t understand her daughter, but she’d gotten this part right. What she’d said was as true then as it was now. Candy had a desperate need to make sense of the world. She wanted things to line up in some order of importance, and when they didn’t, she’d do the rearranging until she could discern some reasonable relationship between cause and effect. Candy would be the one to make sense of it all.

Sometimes this sense was as small as the insertion of a period rather than a comma. The reporter who worked under Candy, The Airhead, could never correct her own splices no matter how many times Candy pointed them out.

Other times, Candy constructed what she believed to be the larger order of things—the fact that it was her mother’s penchant for clutter and spontaneity and what she called “life” that made Candy the way she was, what some, including those concerned teachers, had called obsessive. Neurotic. Controlling. These words were better than those that passed between Candy’s classmates. They couldn’t come up with anything better than weird or weirdo.

Logic of a certain kind and magnitude—what made a person a person, for instance—was not what one would call pleasant, but Candy felt a certain satisfaction in her own knowledge, a haughtiness about the things she knew and assumed others didn’t.

It was pitiful, Candy thought, the way people went on about things, like they had no will or say, like they were sacks of bodies without bones and brains. Candy, for example, was simply explaining that a comma was needed every time you used a conjunction to join two independent clauses when The Airhead ran out of the office with her face caved in on itself and her nose full of snot.

This is why, Candy told Marty, The Airhead is on a fast track to nowhere. In every instance, Candy preferred knowledge to ignorance. Her teachers had appreciated what they called her curiosity and her knack for proper sentence construction even if Candy was a bit ruthless when it came to literature, to understanding a character’s actions and motivations. She was one of those students that came to a story or a novel from a place of righteous expectation. In “My Papa’s Waltz,” she could not get over the fact that the father had a drinking problem. Who cared about this rare moment of tenderness between child and parent? And who could take seriously the blind man in “Cathedral”? They were all just a bunch of drug addicts after all. Regular hedonists with no control. Forgiveness, to Candy, meant nothing, and it seemed, said the teacher, that empathy meant even less.

Candy’s essays and presentations were tiresome, but she never missed a deadline or forgot to introduce quoted material without a proper signal phrase. Such details, her teachers agreed, were important and in fact, essential to success. These fundamental concepts composed the very foundations of good writing, and anything Candy lacked was too difficult to identify, too complicated to correct in the proofreader’s shorthand teachers favored when they were staring down the barrel of a hundred freshman essays. A, their tired hands scrawled, and it was Candy’s own heavy-browed glare, a look so volatile as to foster its own apparition, that came so easily to mind even when the teachers were in their socks in their own homes with their coffee and their cats, and so, seeing this child’s face as if it were there and full of terror in the very room with them, they scratched out the minus. What did, they thought, a few points matter? What did any of it matter when you got down to it?

And this was just the sort of existential thinking that would have driven Candy into a lip-splitting, eye-blackening rage. After a few exemplary incidents, those kids that called her a weirdo weren’t brave enough to say it to her face. They’d seen what could happen. They’d seen what Candy could do.

But in the classroom, Candy’s rigor and dedication as well as her work for the student newspaper—who could forget that stellar article on why they were the Fighting Falcons?—pushed Candy’s teachers to suggest journalism, and, as she had always done, Candy followed their instructions to the soulless letter. There was about her the nature of a robot, as if under that skull of matted brow and hair there was not a mind but instead a set of wires and chips.

All of that had been so long ago, but school, specifically grades 1–12, was somehow still the defining experience of Candy’s existence. Except for the four years she’d spent at Clemson, Candy had lived her whole life in Black Creek in the same house as her mother.

Sympathetic people said it wasn’t that Candy was an unfeeling person. It wasn’t, as one especially bored teacher had hoped, that Candy was a sociopath. It was just, these poor sensitive souls said, that parts of Candy had been arrested. She hadn’t developed in all the ways a girl should, and, too, her curiosity—which was actually more like an aggressive interrogation—was manifested in the very shapes and lines of her physical appearance. There was the squirreled brow she refused to pluck or even, as Sue gently suggested, shape, and this brow, bully that it was, dwarfed and shaded every other feature of Candy’s face that might have held or expressed joy, passion, or even a real sense of sadness. And, in a part of the country that favored monograms and pearls and, on occasion, full skirts and hose, Candy wore baggy slacks that hung loose in the seat and rode tight in the waist and the ankles which gave way to a pair of odorous orthopedic sandals.

What would Candy do, they all wondered, when her mother passed away?

There was, in the house, a general wafting of death and decay that came, yes, from the sandals and the calloused feet that wore them, but also this smell, this horrible sweetness was on account of the small animals that Candy had recently began dissecting.

Sue, a woman with plenty of her own predilections, was terrified of global warming and, consequently, any aerosols including the only air fresheners that had any effect. So it was with a kind of pleading sense of defeat, just the sort of attitude Candy despised, that Sue lit bundle after bundle of herbs and also long sticks of flea market patchouli that smelled more than anything like the barbecue Black Creek was supposedly known for, but the incense did nothing about the odor of decomposition except perhaps make the smell of dead animals a degree more appetizing.

Please, Sue begged, but she didn’t bother asking Candy to stop anything that she was doing. After forty years together, Sue knew better. She did ask if Candy the sweetheart, Candy her little dove, could perhaps consider the outdoors a better place for her projects? Say, for instance, the shed?

But the light in the shed, where Candy’s father had spent most of his time when he was alive—hiding, Sue said—was just a dusty old bulb and no comparison to Candy’s high wattage vanity lamp, and anyway, if the animals stunk to Sue in a way they most certainly did not to Candy, good enough! In the first place, it was Sue’s fault that Candy had never learned the workings of a frog’s intestines or, for another example, the unique respiratory system of a worm. When they’d got to this unit in school, Sue had banned Candy from participating. She’d gone so far as to organize a protest, a picket line against animal cruelty. But such causes found little support in South Carolina, and though a few whimpering mothers had brought protest sandwiches and protest coffee—they felt for Sue, they really did—after an hour or so, it was only Candy and Sue, Candy sitting on the curb with her chin in her hand, watching her mother, who, for the occasion, had drawn whiskers across her cheeks and an upside-down heart for a nose—hold up a poster until her arms shook, screaming, No slice! No mice! No slice! No mice!

Candy tried to explain that the classes didn’t even use mice. There was a worm, and then a cow’s eye, and then a fetal pig, and finally, the culmination of it all and the basis for the final exam—a shark. But Sue wasn’t listening to Candy. Or perhaps she didn’t care. It’s the principle of the matter, Sue said, and though she was beautiful and Candy was most certainly not, there was something in common about their persons even if they couldn’t see it.

They might have, in their shared adulthood, become something like friends as many mothers and daughters will, but instead, they simply continued much as they had before, and at forty, Candy spent most of her time alone, reading a biology textbook she’d found at the Friends of the Library semiannual sale. She was using this book as a guide to learning the workings of small animals, vertebrate and invertebrate. It was slow-going, and though she’d never admit it, new concepts didn’t come as easily for Candy as they once had, but she still had the same determination, the same drive to, as the Fighting Falcons motto said, Believe and achieve!

To Sue, Candy said, You can’t tell me what to do.

A lot of people, besides Candy’s teachers, thought Candy had a few problems. Black Creek was a small town where, everyone conceded, not much happened. It was probably tough for Candy to figure out how, every week, she and the splice-happy reporter would figure out how to fill all ten pages of the newspaper. It was no wonder that every now and then, there’d be some article the drugstore coffee-drinkers would describe as “off the wall.” An editorial, for example, about data collection and the ways in which the government would use the records of your Piggly Wiggly purchases as evidence against you in the case for terrorism. And what about that other column Candy wrote about the dangers of marijuana addiction? Sure, dope was bad, and some of it, that stuff they made with household cleaners, for example, was real bad—everybody could agree on that, but the ferocity of Candy’s conviction, the sharpness of her tone (These people are the very dredges, the open sewage of our modern society.) made you feel downright sorry for the druggies. Addiction, the pharmacist said, was an illness, after all.

In this way, Candy was deft at achieving but often with the opposite of her intended effect.

Most everybody figured Candy was just doing her best to make a name for herself, to break out as young people were always wanting to do. Black Creek was a conservative place, but the people were surprisingly sympathetic. They forgave one another, or at least pretended to, and maybe this was why, after Clemson, Candy had come back. Even if, despite all those research-heavy articles on the school’s mascot, she hadn’t been made teenage queen of the Black Creek universe (weirdo!). Even if she didn’t get along so well with her mother. Even if this and a million other things stood as good reasons for Candy to make a life elsewhere, maybe being away at Clemson had taught her that she wouldn’t be accepted—not even a little bit—anywhere but here.

Candy didn’t talk much about college, and in a way, it was like that time in Candy’s life wasn’t quite real, as if she could only exist in one place in her own particular and puzzling way.

Sue figured that, at the very least, Candy was a homosexual, and Sue, being the caftan-wearing, patchouli-burning free spirit that she had carefully crafted herself into being, spent a lot of time reassuring Candy that she wouldn’t have a problem, she wouldn’t say a word if Candy wanted to, someday, say, bring over another little dove.

Candy didn’t answer one way or another except to say, Gawd! in such a way that made her seem somewhere near a quarter of her age, which was probably accurate in emotion if not intellect.

Sue remained convinced that homosexuality wasn’t just one of Candy’s problems but was, of course, the very crux of all of Candy’s less than desirable traits—her irritations and her tantrums, what Sue referred to as “mood storms.” Sue had a lot of interesting phrases. All would be revealed when Candy acknowledged her primal self as Sue had done during the post-intermission session of a Pink Floyd tribute concert.

With all this thought about cores of the self and girlfriends, Sue could not have been more shocked—and, admittedly, relieved—to hear, one morning, the deep notes of a man’s voice coming from behind Candy’s closed door. Sue’s authentic primal self was actually far more conservative than she’d like to admit. So happy was Sue that she fell back in bed and back to sleep as if Candy’s newfound and surprisingly conventional love life was a kind of lullaby, a bedtime story that, like Candy, had been constructed for the sole purpose of relaxing and comforting Sue herself.

Little did Sue know, about this or, according to Candy, anything else. This was not the first time Candy had been with Officer Marty. The first time had taken place in Candy’s office, after hours, after The Airhead had left with a stack of grammar handbooks Candy had loaned her with relevant lessons flagged by yellow sticky notes. Yes, the first time with Marty was in the office of The Record, and some—those with a limited understanding of Candy-like individuals—would be surprised to know that Candy had been the initiator, that she’d been the one to grab Officer Marty by his meaty shoulders and pin him down across her desk, her face sweating and flashing nothing but irritation when Marty’s hand inadvertently sent her cup of red pencils tumbling to the carpet.

Those first few kids who’d said, Weirdo—they would understand. They wouldn’t have a problem imagining the action Candy could take.

And maybe little did Sue know, but little would she have been surprised if made privy to these juicy details because her daughter might have been anti-social and a bit, you might say, of a loner, but Candy was never timid, and, in fact, once, when Sue had come at her with a leather-bound grooming kit, Candy had wrestled Sue to the ground and grabbed the tweezers and swore she’d shove a hole right through Sue’s eye.

She hadn’t gone that far, but still, Sue understood that within Candy rested a power made dark by the world and the people in it which Candy found to be a constant source of disappointment and frustration, boneless saps that they were.

Candy had those red pencils collected and back where they belonged, point down in the cup, before good old Officer Marty could zip his fly. My lands, Marty said, you’re something.

And Candy, who by that time, was back in her office chair, told Officer Marty that if he ever had any hopes of becoming sergeant, he should really make an effort to be more specific when communicating. Saying a person is something, she said, is as good as saying a person is nothing.

She stared at Marty. Is that what you mean?

And good old Officer Marty, poor soul, said exactly what he meant, which wasn’t much. I don’t know, he said, and it was then that one of those red pencils, sharpened to a fine point, flew like a dart beside the red gristle of Marty’s ear.

Candy was tough. That much was certain. And not in the moments leading up to that time or the weeks after did she ever believe she thought (and she certainly didn’t feel) anything remotely lovey-dovey (one of Sue’s favorite phrases) about Officer Marty. He was neither handsome nor charming with his hard, low paunch and his skinny legs and his typical tearful story—so trite, Candy could have finished his sentences—of his recent separation from his wife Deborah and what he feared would soon become a custody battle because what Candy didn’t know was that good old Officer Marty had a taste for some of the things he found in the pockets and the trunks of Black Creek’s less desirables. My boy, Marty said when he got talking about his son. My baby boy, Marty nearly moaned, and it was all Candy could do not to slap him.

But there was something about Marty—the way he let Candy grab him by the shoulders and throw him down, for example, or the way he smiled when she threw the pencil—that Candy found attractive, that Candy found downright irresistible. If anyone had asked her about Marty, which absolutely no one did, Candy would have said that Officer Marty, like The Airhead and like Sue, could stand to learn a thing or two including but not limited to the importance of specific language and the proper identification of a frog’s pancreas which was to the right of the gall bladder.

That morning, which really was the fourth time they’d been together, Candy was working at the frog with the heavy biology book splayed out across the vanity. She was, in fact, using the very same tweezers that she’d promised to send through to the nut she said Sue had for a brain. See there, Candy said. There is the small intestine.

Candy spoke, like always, with authority, but the truth was she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure where the stomach ended and the small intestine began. The picture in the book didn’t look like real life, and anyway, Candy was having a hard time concentrating.

Behind her, Marty was waking up.

Something about this, their fourth time together, had been different, and even though Candy kept picking at the frog that she’d trapped in the tangled coil of the water hose and then suffocated in a Mason jar, she was, in her mind, making a list of things that weren’t the same.

Officer Marty, number one, had rolled Candy over—rather clumsily but ultimately successfully and with some force—so that he was on top. This was a definite difference.

Difference number two, they’d been in an actual bed instead of across her desk or in the back of his patrol car.

Number three, Officer Marty had either lost weight or put on some muscle in his thighs. He had a more balanced feel to him, and Candy kept glancing up from the dead frog to the reflection of Officer Marty in her vanity mirror.

He was awake now. He’d pushed on his glasses, and he was looking at his phone, and before Candy could catch herself, she said, Is it her?

Marty blinked, which for him, sometimes seemed more like a twitch, a kind of compulsive squinting that, like his pathetic “my boy” refrain, bothered Candy immensely. Is it who?

Deborah, Candy said. On the phone?

Marty looked back at the phone like he needed Candy to tell him what it was he held and what he was supposed to do with it. His chin tripled when he tucked it so, and Candy scratched the part about him dropping a few pounds. When he shook his head, the chins quivered. It’s about a girl, he said. They found one. Down in the creek. Dead.

Candy watched him in the mirror, and for a minute, neither one of them moved. They might have been two figures in a bizarre portrait, shirtless fat Marty in bed with his phone and Candy with her splayed frog and still in her bath robe. It would have been just the sort of art, full of reflection and symbol and secret emotion, that Candy would have hated no matter how hard her teachers would have tried to get her to see what it was that brought these two together or, conversely, what kept them apart and what ultimately their experience said about the rest of us.

She’s got, the teachers had often said about Candy, so much potential.

Then Candy moved. Candy whirled around on the silly backless vanity stool and said, What girl? You didn’t tell me about any girl.

Marty’s whole body was squinched down on itself—his eyes, his neck, his shoulders. Some people don’t like talking about work.

Some people aren’t me.

Marty looked at her. He took a breath and let it out his nose, which rattled. Then he pushed off the covers, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and reached for his pants.

They found her in the creek, Marty said.

You said that.

She was dead.

You said that, too.

So I did tell you, Marty said. He stood up, zipped his pants, buckled his belt. Even if he had lost some weight, he was still fat. Or at least he looked fat from where Candy was on the stool.

We’re still trying to find the parents, Marty said. It’s hush-hush.

People have a right to know, Candy said.

Marty opened his mouth, and even though he was awake, he looked as slack as when he’d been sleeping with his face jammed against the pillow. He buttoned the last button on his shirt. Then he reached back to his pocket, and for a single absurd second, Candy thought he would take out his wallet. That he would take out his wallet and reach inside and give her money. It was a ridiculous thought. No sense to it. Marty was only checking to make sure he had everything, and when he saw that he did, he kissed Candy on the top of the head. He told her he’d see her soon.

What’s the girl’s name? Candy said, but Marty was gone.

Alone, Candy sat with her jaw hanging loose, a look she found maddening when she caught it in other people. In the window, a fly buzzed, drawn by the smell of the frog.

Candy had sensed a difference in Marty, and now she thought maybe the dead girl was it. Black Creek was a small town, the kind of town, Marty would say later, where kids didn’t die. Outside of the small-time drug busts, Marty’s job primarily consisted of speeding tickets and cat rescues. A dead girl in the creek wouldn’t be anything Marty was used to seeing, and it wasn’t the kind of thing Candy was used to writing about, but to Candy, every story was the same and constructed from a kind of formula. She’d put all the pieces together—the hook, the news, the backstory, and the future cast.

In the window, the fly buzzed, and Candy spun back around, and it was then that she’d realized that her robe had fallen open, that when she’d turned back toward Marty, not as a lover to a lover but as an editor to a cop, one of her breasts was bared.

The exposure was worse for being incomplete. If Candy had been without the robe at all, she might have said the revelation was of her own accord. But as it was, this small and loose sack, this evidence of human corporality, the inadvertent exposure of this breast let flow a rush of embarrassment and shame that, in Candy, quickly turned to anger and sometimes violence. When she stood up, the stupid stool crashed to the floor where Candy left it in her rush to reach for an old issue of The Record, which she took in her hand and made into a tube and thwacked so hard against the window that the glass, or something, cracked, and still, as Sue called out, as Sue yelled, Okay in there? the fly circled above Candy’s head looking for a place to land.

The girl’s name was Makeisha Toffer Powell. Candy managed to pull this information from a reluctant and surprisingly terse Officer Marty in addition to the following facts, which she wrote down in all caps in every other line of her reporter’s notebook: 15 YRS OLD, DROWNING (ACCID? SUI? MURD?), 127 QUINBY PLACE.

This last part, which meant that Candy and Makeisha were practically neighbors, came as a bit of a shock. Candy tried to think of girls she’d seen around the neighborhood, but she couldn’t remember anything specific. She’d never had much use for girls and after a certain age, didn’t really think of herself as one. In her mind, they were all different versions of Sue, bouncing figures with little else to consider but boys and brows and perfumes.

There were always girls roaming the streets, prowling the sidewalks like they were looking for something to eat or otherwise get into. But to Candy, they were all the same. She couldn’t tell one from the next.

That’s the grandmother’s house, Marty said about the place on Quinby and then he told her to go on, to get out of the office. He was going to lose his job, his pension if Candy didn’t watch out.

They were sitting at his desk, which was different than Candy’s desk in that it was out in the open of a large room full of other desks, a positioning that prohibited Candy from certain courses of action. Even in December, the place was hot with bodies and computers. Nobody was watching them, but Marty kept looking over his shoulder.

It’s your own shadow, Candy said, but she got up. She pulled her sweater out and over her chest. Are we on?

Marty pushed at his glasses. His eye twitched, and his head swiveled on his neck. I don’t know. I might have Roger.

Roger. The boy. My boy, as Marty would say if he were spinning his sad little tale.

You’ve gotta eat.

I don’t think so.

Fine.

Hey.

Candy was walking away from him now. She kept on like she didn’t hear.

Wait, Marty said. Stop.

Candy stopped. She’d eaten too much for breakfast. Sue’s strange curried eggs had turned to a hard knot in her belly. This was what she told herself. This was what she tried to believe as Marty motioned for her to come back, and as she did, after only a few seconds, exactly what she was told.

Marty was writing something down on a sticky pad. His handwriting was terrible, partly because, Candy saw, he held his pen all wrong. She was about to tell him so when he tore off the sheet and handed it to her.

Candy held the paper far away. Then she brought it up to her face until she could make out that it said, Twilight.

Maybe tomorrow, Marty said.

There was real regret in his voice, like he was sorry to say it, like he was saying he was sorry.

Candy looked at him, the wobbly neck, the twitching face, the lips he licked to obsession. If asked, she would have said that Officer Marty was a pathetic, repulsive little man.

Corina’s, she said. Tomorrow.

All that afternoon, they’d worked on proofing an issue, which had taken hours longer than it should have on the sole account, according to Candy, of The Airhead’s willful ineptitude. Apparently, the reporter, who was actually just an unpaid intern from the technical college and for whom the job was intended by the school to be an exciting and beneficial learning experience, had not taken full advantage of the grammar handbooks Candy had so graciously lent, and when Candy asked why she hadn’t completed the night’s homework, the intern said, of all things, that she’d had a date, that her boyfriend had (Can you believe it?!) asked her to marry him.

The copy teemed with splices as well as fragments and capitalization errors. Sentences bled together down the page.

The Airhead had forgotten herself. That is, she’d forgotten who she was speaking to, and while Candy marked and slashed with the red pencil, The Airhead went on about how the boyfriend (now—imagine!—she could call him a fiancé) had ordered their favorite type of pizza and how he’d wiped cheese off her chin just before he’d gotten down on one knee and thank goodness because the waiter took their picture, and the whole restaurant clapped . . .

And it wasn’t that Candy was ignoring her. In fact, Candy found it hard to ignore anything, and so could not typically and efficiently do more than one task at a time, and just now, after five, she was losing ground on the proofing and giving in to the scene The Airhead was bent on creating, except for the man on one knee in Candy’s mind had a triple chin and a twitching eye, and when The Airhead took a breath, Candy said, Get out!

And while The Airhead stood gaping with just that stupid expression, Candy said, Go! Out of here! Now!

She said some other things then, things that only The Airhead would remember later. It was a vile, vitriolic little stream that sent The Airhead scrambling around her desk, gathering up her tote bag and her water bottle, and the poor girl actually let out a little yelp when she finally closed the door behind her.

When she was gone, Candy stood in the middle of the empty office. Her feet were planted flat on the floor. Her hands were fists at her sides, and if she felt any regret, if she had the slightest sense of misplaced aggression, she pushed it out of mind, or, rather, she pushed it far down inside herself beside the knot Candy blamed on Sue. With a military flair, she spun on her heel and marched back to her desk where she continued to proof and correct in the old-fashioned paper-and-pencil way she preferred.

Candy took her temper from her father. This according to Sue. Candy’s own memory of her father was specific but maddeningly minimal and consisted primarily of a sawdust smell and the soft knees of slacks worn thin.

Sue, though, remembered everything and liked most of all to regale Candy with stories about her father’s own “mood storms.”

He’d get mad at the least little thing, and he’d stomp around, and you could nearly see the smoke coming out of his nose, Sue said. It was best just to let him go out there to the shed and hide from life for a while. He’d be better the next day. You could just see all the bad stuff running out of him.

So Sue was right and she was wrong too because while Candy was prone to real and abiding anger, it seemed there was nothing she could do to release it. She wasn’t better the next day. It seemed that all she did was get worse. Explosions such as what befell the unsuspecting, stupidly happy Airhead that afternoon were only illusions. Any eruption only fed a deeper well of malice that had been building practically since Candy was born.

She could feel the weight of it within her, this place where she pushed everything, and more so, she could feel the levity in others—in Sue worst of all but also in The Airhead and Marty and, Candy guessed, in Roger and Deborah, too. My boy, my boy! All of them acted and behaved with a kind of shallow irresponsibility to themselves and the world.

Under her desk, Candy struck at her stomach with a closed fist. The pancreas was right, so the gall bladder left. A comma here. No comma there.

Corina’s Mexican restaurant was in an older building downtown and all the buildings downtown, including the police station and the newspaper office, suffered from significant and occasionally terrifying bat infestations. Perhaps in an effort to cover the stink of guano and bats more generally, the owners and operators of Corina’s mopped the floor a dozen or more times a day with quadruple the appropriate amount of Pine Sol. Still, the place smelled like a cave and the food carried interesting flavors of dirt and chemicals of the lemon-scented ammonia variety. Sue swore the food would kill people if the hole in the atmosphere didn’t take care of everybody first.

Candy sat in a booth working on her second basket of tortilla chips. The chips made little cuts along her gums and under her tongue, and the salsa on these cuts was so painful as to be almost medicinal. Candy ate more. She ate faster.

She’d spent all of the previous day and, after the blowup at The Airhead, half the night working at the proofs. Now the issue was at the printer, and so they were at work on the next edition, which would feature Candy’s yet-to-be-written article about Makeisha Powell.

Candy had a start. That is, she had some facts. When they—the coroner with help from paramedics and Marty—pulled the body from the creek, they’d found, in the girl’s pocket, a school ID with the Quinby Place address, and there, at 127, they’d found Makeisha’s grandmother, bedridden, soiled, and nearly starved to death. At some point, maybe years ago, Mrs. Powell had suffered a stroke, and the best they could tell, Makeisha had been the one taking care of Mrs. Powell ever since. The parents, like a lot of parents in Black Creek, were nowhere anybody knew.

At Twilight Nursing Home, Mrs. Powell laid on her side and curled in on herself. Her hands were tucked to her chest, like a baby’s, and she seemed not to notice that Candy was in the room.

Candy sat down in the chair and, after a minute, she pulled the chair closer. She stared at Mrs. Powell, and Mrs. Powell stared at a spot on the waxed tiled floor.

Candy took in air and let it out again. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a copy of the photograph she’d found that morning in a school yearbook. There wasn’t much to be told from it—just a girl with braids and a wide smile, and if you stared too long, as Candy had, the girl’s face disintegrated into pixels, a kind of black and white confetti.

Still, Candy showed it to the woman, hoping it might have some effect.

She waited, but there was no response except the slow blink that Mrs. Powell kept up like a clock, like a part of herself that worked by mechanics and nothing else.

Your granddaughter, Candy said. Makeisha?

Another blink. Then nothing.

In the other room, some patients were watching Young and the Restless. Candy had seen the TV while she waited for the nurse at the front desk. Sue liked those shows, and it drove Candy crazy—the plotlines that went on for years, forever even, and just when you had it figured out, they threw in something else like a convict or a ghost that sent everything spinning in a new direction.

On the television, there was a sound like a gunshot, and as if it was fear that caused her to move, Candy reached out, grabbed Mrs. Powell’s hand. The fingers were cool and hard as sticks, and Candy tried to make them hold onto the photograph.

Remember, she said, your granddaughter, Makeisha.

She studied the old woman’s face, which was dull and void of expression, and still for a minute, a few seconds, Candy had a feeling that was equal parts plausible and unreasonable, that the woman was seeing her, that she was seeing the inside of her, and in the woman’s yellow eyes, Candy saw Sue with a handful of fire and Office Marty on one knee and before him, she saw herself, and her belly was cut, and she was pointing to the way things were. She was saying, The gall bladder left! And, as clearly as if the old woman had a dissecting needle, Candy felt a sharp prick.

Without thought and without measure, Candy said, Please!

It was not a word she used often, and so, from her tongue, it carried a kind of trill, and in Mrs. Powell, there was a flicker, an undeniable shade of recognition, and Mrs. Powell did not take her eyes off Candy even when the nurse came in and said, Somebody should have told you. She’s non-verbal.

The voice startled Candy.

She can’t talk, the nurse said.

Because she’s non-verbal, Candy said. She glared at the nurse, but the nurse didn’t seem to notice.

I think she’s still in there though, she said. I’ve worked here long enough to know it’s possible. Anything is.

Candy turned back to Mrs. Powell. A line of spit ran down the woman’s chin into a bubble that very prettily popped.

Now, at Corina’s, Candy was waiting on Marty even if she was pretending otherwise. A part of her wanted to tell him about Mrs. Powell, but she wouldn’t. Mrs. Powell she would add to the heap of things she did her best not to acknowledge, a regular stinking dump that would, too, house the vision with which Candy was just then confronted.

See it to know it. That’s how Candy used to be and maybe in some ways, maybe in more ways than she thought, Candy hadn’t changed all that much. To see Deborah was to know her, to see her hand in Marty’s and Marty and The Boy, My Boy wearing their matching Fighting Falcon T-shirts. To see the family was to know the family and so much more, it was all Candy could do to shove her mouth full of enchiladas that tasted like dirt, like Earth, like the very world that caused Candy so much trouble and, if she were honest, pain, and she might have killed herself. She’d thought about it more than once. More than a lot of times. But if Marty was scared of his own shadow which was a shade composed not only of himself but of Deborah and My Boy and his pension and, of course, Candy, then Candy herself was terrified. It wasn't the doing—the slitting of the wrists or the tying of the noose—the procedure, that is, of suicide that scared her, but of that moment when she could do nothing else but accept what came as it came whether or not it conformed to her idea of structure. It was this very moment that, for Mrs. Powell, had expanded in such a way that it had become more than time, so that it was also a place, a dark pit without beginning or end or center from which a person could only languish and, if she was so lucky, scream.

So what Candy might have done was never what she did. What she did was stab at the greasy pool of rice and beans at the edge of the platter, and that night, when she came home growling and hitting at her stomach, Sue said, What did I tell you? It’s all nothing but poison.

Candy told Marty she was going to kill him. She told Marty, during the phone call she received late that night, that she planned to cut him up into little pieces and carry those pieces down to the alligators. She knew where there were some, a whole family, less than an hour away. And then, she would wrestle and kill the specific alligator, as Marty knew she was very capable of doing, and she would slice that alligator from Adam to anus and remove Marty’s dismembered and now partially digested body to see which parts of him—the brain, she was betting—disappeared first.

This was what she told Marty. This was what she said.

On the other end of the line, Marty let loose a great hiccupping heave of a sob, and he said he was sorry, and he said Candy had every right to cut him up into little pieces and feed him to the family of alligators or whatever she wanted, and that in some ways, he felt like somebody had done the job already. It was the girl in the creek. Seeing her there in the water, pulling her out and holding her hand. That’d been his part, to hold her hand and pull, and it was almost like she would come alive, like in the fairy stories he read to his boy and that his own mother had read to him. Like the girl would open her eyes and ask for a prince or a father, for an answer of how long she’d been sleeping.

This stuff doesn’t happen here, Marty said in between gulps for air. This isn’t the kind of place where kids die.

Marty blew his nose, and when he was finished and another minute had passed, he said, Hello? Candy? Are you there?

Candy could hear him breathing through his mouth like he did when he was fast asleep, and in that space between them, in that relative silence, there was everything anyone wanted. There was in the calling out and the waiting a need so basic as to be shared by humans and animals alike, and as if in answer to some much larger question, Candy said, Yes. I’m still here.

Good, Marty said, and then he made a sound like a laugh but one in which there was no joy, only relief. That’s good.

Because he was going to make some changes. He’d leave Deborah. He’d make sergeant. He’d take a couple of classes at Tech. I’ll do, he said, whatever you want.

Candy was at her vanity. She’d had to throw the frog away. The smell had gotten too bad even for her, but the book was still there. The book was still open to the diagram, and now, as Marty rattled on about all his hopes and dreams, Candy traced with her finger the workings of the frog—the strange flag of the brain and the heart which seemed, in its central location, superior to a human’s at least in terms of symmetry.

In the mirror, above the book, Candy saw herself. She knew what it was the old woman had seen, and she knew, too, what Mrs. Powell had asked of her as if the woman had opened her mouth and spoken more clearly than Marty was now.

Candy studied her reflection, her hair, her face, her neck. She loosened her robe, let it slip down over her broad shoulders. She put a hand over the place where her frog’s heart would be, and she told Officer Marty exactly what she wanted.

The house at 127 Quinby Place was empty. That isn’t to say there wasn’t furniture, but somehow, even with the coffee table and the sofa lounger and the chair with the doilies on the arms, the living room and every room thereafter gave the impression of things missing.

Hurry up, Marty said. He’d agreed to what she’d asked of him, but he didn’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.

The kitchen was alarmingly bright, clean dishes on the drying rack. A single cup in the sink. Candy picked up this glass and held it to the light. The tap leaked regularly as a clock.

Move it, Marty said.

Candy looked back over her shoulder, but from this part of the house, she couldn’t see the front door where Marty stood guard.

That morning, he’d picked Candy up from the newspaper office like they’d agreed, and he said how sorry he was and that nothing like that would happen again and that it was over between him and Deborah and that he did certain things on account of his boy and then he asked Candy what was different about her. Something, he said, is different.

And Candy told him he was imagining things, that guilt could make a person see what wasn’t there, and this part was true and nothing like what Candy said next about being the same, about being just how she always was.

Candy moved from the kitchen and down the hall, which was darker than any other part of the house. There were framed pictures there, mostly women from what Candy could tell, but in the shadows, all the portraits might have been the same person at different stages of her life. The same high forehead. The same sharp chin.

The first room Candy came to had been the old woman’s. The bed was unmade and still a mess from the days the old woman had spent unattended. Marty said the paramedics said it was a miracle the lady didn’t die.

There on the grandmother’s dresser was a bud vase with the withered remains of what looked like small tree branches. The leaves had fallen around the bottom of the vase, a passing season in miniature.

Candy went on, further down the hall. The door at the end was closed, and Candy reached out, took hold of the cold knob, and pushed.

She’d had expectations, a collection of details she’d gleaned primarily from television shows. There would be a stereo. Posters. Dirty clothes under the bed. A drawer of stolen makeup.

But what Candy found was as neat as every other part of the house. The bed was covered in a yellow chenille spread that was straight and folded so as to cover the pillows. The closet door was shut, and when Candy opened it, she saw that all the clothes were hung or else folded and stacked on the top shelf. At the end of the rod were several formal dresses wrapped carefully in clear plastic.

Candy looked back down the hall to make sure this was the only other bedroom besides the grandmother’s, which it was. But the room seemed like it didn’t belong to any girl, like somebody had just stayed there.

There was no TV, no radio, no collection of tapes or CDs. There was, though, a little desk by the window. A silver soup can of pens and pencils and a stack of school books—Algebra I, Health Today, English in the Modern World.

Candy picked up the English book, flipped through the pages. She saw some familiar titles, but she hadn’t read those stories in what seemed like a hundred years. Things were circled and underlined. There were notes in the margins. Bub sees what Robert sees, Makeisha had written at the end of the Carver story.

Marty was calling out to Candy.

Just a minute, Candy said.

With the other books was a library copy of The Hidden Lives of Wolves. It wasn’t anything for biology class. That is, there weren’t diagrams of skeletons and organs as in the book Candy had been studying. This book was more about wolf culture, community—clear color photographs of wolves running, wolves howling, wolves baring rows of sharp teeth.

What is it? Marty was saying.

And maybe this book hadn’t been for a class, but Makeisha had studied it all the same. The pages were rippled and marked. Passages were underlined—the modern study of wolves has revealed the true nature of the pack, and it is far less fanciful and far more familiar than many people had imagined.

Candy turned the page. Certain pictures—mostly those of the lanky gray wolf pups—were circled with such force that Candy could feel the rut of the line beneath her thumb. She could feel the force of all that came behind it, of all that came before, and she could feel, too, her own blood pumping, a pulsing that came from her very core, and Marty was there now, and he was asking her what she’d found, and looking at him, Candy couldn’t imagine what she’d ever seen in him, what she ever imagined to teach him or anyone else. It’s nothing, Candy said, and Marty and everything in the room blurred and jerked and one thing could not, even by Candy, be told from another.

Makeisha had drowned in Black Creek. This much they knew for certain. But they were still trying to determine the specifics, whether the drowning was accidental, suicidal, or, Marty said, otherwise. Too, they discovered that at the time of her death, Makeisha had been pregnant.

Marty gave Candy this news over the phone. He said, That last part, you can’t print. Tonight. Corina’s. Me and you.

Candy hung up the phone. On her desk was the book about wolves. She wasn’t supposed to take it. She wasn’t supposed to take anything, but she wasn’t supposed to touch anything either. She’d hidden the book under her jacket, stuffed it halfway down the waist of her pants.

She read what Makeisha had read—all about wolves, their habitats, their predilections, the ways in which they were misunderstood. Candy had spent all that time trying to learn, trying to remember what all was on the inside, but now, what was left of the pancreas didn’t seem to matter so much.

Candy read with her head in her hand, and with her brow hidden as it was, she looked like a child, and she was a child. She was a child and she was a forty-year-old woman, and in some way, Candy began to understand how she could become Makeisha, how she was Makeisha, how Marty was Makeisha, how Sue was Makeisha, how they all were Makeisha, and this didn’t make sense exactly, but Candy saw now that hardly anything did. The truth was that reasons and methods and formulas had little business in the dealings of real people. Things happened in a way that didn’t follow fixed charts and diagrams because when you got down to it, Mrs. Powell wasn’t alone in the dark. They were all there with her, a kind of pack that moved together, that hunted together.

Candy saw now that she had no idea how to write this story or any other. Maybe the soap operas had it right after all. Maybe the purest form was a constant unraveling.

She felt sick, to be sure, but there was also a not altogether unpleasing levity. What a person might feel, for instance, after she’s been gutted and what she’s carried all this time has finally, if violently, been removed. What, in such a moment, might a person say?

Candy’s hands trembled above the keys, and at last, after all these years, she really and truly began.