The Mark He Left Me

The dog on my table doesn’t know yet.

He’s a senior lab. Fourteen and change. The kidney panel last month said what kidney panels say at fourteen. His owner cried in the lobby for twenty minutes, signed the paper, and went home, because she couldn’t watch. I told her she didn’t have to. I told her she wasn’t a worse person for it. I’ve told a lot of people that.

His name is Buddy. They’re all named Buddy. The ones that aren’t are named Max.

“Hey, sweetheart.” My hand is on his side. His breathing slows without me having to check the monitor. The lab manager taught me this years ago, before I was good at the rest of the job. You put your hand on them. You let them feel a hand. You don’t let them die alone in a room full of strangers. I’m very good at it now. I’m not proud of being good at it.

“You’re okay,” I say. “You’re okay, Bud. You’re okay.”

He goes. The monitor flatlines thirty seconds after I feel it happen. The body keeps working a little while after the dog is already gone — that’s one of the harder things about the job. I keep my hand where it is for another minute. Then I cover him.

I wash my hands.

The mirror over the sink is the kind you stop looking at. Tonight I look.

The mark on my collarbone is bleeding through my scrubs.

It’s been bleeding for three days. I’ve been pretending it isn’t. I’ve been pretending a lot of things, because the alternative is saying the words, and I don’t want to say the words.

I can say one of them.

It means he is close.

That’s all I’m going to say about it tonight. I have a dog to move to the cooler and a chart to close. That’s what I’m going to do.

So I do it. I move Buddy. I close the chart. I sit at the desk a minute with my hands flat on the desktop. The tired that comes after a comfort-care case is its own kind of tired. I’ve learned not to push through it.

The phone rings.

The screen says AUNT IRIS.

I don’t pick up.

It rings again. Same screen. Same name. I haven’t seen her name on my phone in eleven months. She hasn’t called. I haven’t either. We agreed about that without ever using words.

I pick up.

“Wren.” It’s the voice she uses for the people she’s calling about. Calm. Steady. Worn smooth from doing it. “Wren, sweetheart. Your mother. It’s time.”

“I’ll be there.”

I say it before I’ve decided to. I say it the way you say I’ll be right there to a dog bleeding on your table before you’ve found where the bleeding starts. You say the thing that gets your hands moving. You figure out the rest later.

“Drive safe, lamb.”

She hangs up.

The lab manager comes back from the bathroom. She looks at my face and doesn’t say anything. Twenty-six years a vet tech. She knows what it looks like.

“Go,” she says.

I go.

Holloway is two states from where I’m going.

I’ve done this drive twice. The first time was the night I left, five years ago, and I don’t remember any of it. The second was the summer my mother got sick. I don’t remember much of that one either. This one I think I’ll remember. I’m working on not minding.

The truck is a 2009 Tacoma with a cracked windshield and a heater that sounds like a small animal complaining. I love it the way you love things that have never let you down. I throw a duffel in the passenger seat. I’ve packed wrong — I always pack wrong — but I packed what I can’t replace. The vet license. The phone charger. The good knife my grandmother left me, the one my aunt put in my hand the night I left.

I don’t own a black dress. Haven’t in five years. My mother would tell me to borrow one from her closet, the way she lent me everything in it from the time I was twelve. After eighteen, we stopped having conversations about closets.

I drive.

The mark is worse than it was at the clinic. It sits warm under the wool of my sweater, warm in a way nothing else on me is. I’ve been ignoring it for three days. I did a good job. The job has run out.

The flashes come the way they come. I don’t invite them. I haven’t in five years, and they’ve never asked.

The smell of rye bread, low in wool. My mother was baking it the morning she came down and told me what she was. I was eleven.

A hand on my shoulder. Hers. Landing on the bone, not the muscle — like she was checking I was still made of bone.

A horn. Three notes, long-short-long. I haven’t heard it since I was eighteen. I hear it in my chest.

I turn the heater up. I drive.

The sky goes pale. The road goes highway to two-lane to dirt, and dirt means I’m almost there. My pack put this road down a hundred years ago because the county wouldn’t. I’ve ridden it in a child seat in the back of my father’s truck. I walked it home from school every spring until I was fourteen.

I park behind the funeral hall. Cars line the road for a quarter mile. I’m the last to arrive, and I’m last on purpose. I’ve been planning this part since Holloway.

I sit in the truck two minutes. I look at the chapel. It hasn’t changed — stone and grey, older than the lodge, older than anything anyone in my pack remembers. Inside it, my mother is laid out on a stone older than her, in a dress I’ve never seen, with the pack assembled around her.

I’ve been a binder’s daughter my whole life. I know what’s happening in that chapel. I’ve watched it happen for other people’s mothers, other people’s grandmothers. Two of my aunts. One cousin. I know the shape of it. I know where I’m supposed to stand and what people will say to me and what I’m supposed to say back.

I don’t know how to do it for her.

I get out of the truck.

I walk up the path between the parked cars. The wind is the wind we get in November — pine and stone and cold ground that hasn’t turned over yet. And underneath it, threaded through everything, the smell I’d know in any country in the world.

My pack.

I’d forgotten how much I missed it. I didn’t let myself remember until I was standing in it.

I stop at the chapel door. It’s half open. Low voices inside, the way pack voices go when there’s a body in the room. I put my hand on the door frame because I need to put my hand on something.

I came here for you, I think. I came here for nothing else.

I’m lying. I haven’t stopped lying to myself in five years, and I’ve gotten good at it. Not as good as I think.

I push the door open.

The room goes quiet in waves.

The pack goes quiet from the back first — the wolves who saw the door and didn’t need to look at who came through. Then it works forward. Bench by bench. Eyes finding mine, finding the floor again. The only ones still talking are the two old aunts at the front, who wouldn’t stop talking if the chapel caught fire.

My mother is at the front.

I look for her first. I told myself for ten miles that I’d look for her first.

She’s in grey. Not everyday grey — the dark grey of a binder, almost the color of the stone she’s laid on. Her hair is pinned the way she pinned it on Sundays. Someone has put a sprig of cedar in her hands.

I walk toward her. The pack opens for me. I don’t look at any of them. I don’t have to — I know where every wolf in this room is, and I knew it from the second I crossed the threshold. I didn’t know I could still do that. I’d told myself for five years I’d lost it. The pack just waited, quietly, for me to be wrong.

I stop three feet from her. I don’t move closer.

I put my hand on the edge of the stone. It’s colder than her hand was the last time I held it — six weeks ago, in a hospital that wouldn’t let me bring her home. I came here for you, I think again, and this time it’s what it’s supposed to be.

I don’t cry. I don’t cry in front of people. Haven’t since I was eleven. My mother taught me how. Up, lamb. Look up, look at the ceiling. You can cry when you get home. I look up. I look at the ceiling. It’s the same ceiling I learned to read at six, when my grandmother was laid on this same stone. I’ve been crying at this ceiling my whole life.

Then —

The mark on my collarbone goes hot.

Not the warm bleeding of the last three days. Hot. My body has noticed something my brain hasn’t caught. My wolf — five years buried, five years quiet, five years a thing I told myself I no longer had — turns over in my chest like an animal waking.

She knows.

She’s known since I crossed the door. She’s been waiting for the polite part to end.

I don’t turn my head.

I keep my eyes on the ceiling. My hand on the stone. I count to three. I tell myself I’ll look once. Register what I have to. Then go back to my mother, because that’s what I came here for.

I turn my head.

He’s against the back wall. He’s been there the whole time — two days, by my count. He wouldn’t approach my mother in front of the pack, and he wouldn’t leave her either. Not at the front, where the family stood. Not at the side, where the council stood. The back, like a stranger. Because he’d decided he wasn’t allowed to be a person who had loved her.

His eyes find mine.

I had a word for the grey of his eyes, five years ago. I haven’t used it since. I’m not using it tonight.

His eyes are grey, and the moment they find me, they’re not anything I can call human.

I look back at my mother. Slowly. The way you turn from a thing you’ve decided not to engage with — which is not the same as turning from a thing you can survive looking at.

I put my other hand on the stone.

I spent five years building a life out of never seeing him again. Now I have thirty seconds to decide whether the woman I became can survive being in the same room as him.

A note from the author —

Hi loves 🖤

She’s home. And he was waiting — of course he was.

That mark on her collarbone went hot the second she crossed the threshold. It’s been bleeding for three days. So what do you think it does when he actually touches her? Tell me your theory.

Next chapter: a side hall, a dress with blood on it, and the first words he’s said to her in five years.

Drop a heart if you’re with me. Tell me where you’re reading from.

— Zoey