Praise for Alisa Sheckley
writing as Alisa Kwitney

TILL THE FAT LADY SINGS

 

 

 

“If Milan Kundera, Tama Janowitz and Dr. Joyce Brothers had collaborated on a book, they might have come up with this imaginative and quirky first novel.”

 

—MAXINE CHERNOFF,
The New York Times Book Review

 

 

 

 

 

“A lively novel and a compulsive read, which is saying a lot—and it taught me a thing or two, which is saying even more.”

 

—FAY WELDON

 

 

 

 

 

“Subversive, revolutionary … It's great!”

 

—CAROLYN SEE, Los Angeles Times

 

 

 

 

 

“A delicious confection, as tart and spikey as a lemon meringue pie.”

 

—LAURIE MUCHNIK, Newsday

 

 

 

 

 

“Bright and funny and remarkably poised.”

 

—The Boston Globe

 

 

 

 

 

“A cool, funny, stylish, and very original look at life and love in Manhattan, by a remarkable new writer.”

 

—ALISON LURIE

 

 

 

 

 

“Hip, contemporary, Alisa Kwitney is also a stylist: funny and wonderful, witty and philosophical.”

 

—KIT REED

 

 

 

 

 

“Till the Fat Lady Sings is an engrossing satire of the New York female intelligentsia.”

 

—NAOMI WOLF

 

 

 

 

 

“An immensely poised and well-crafted performance, which kept me smiling to myself throughout.”

 

—PHILLIP LOPATE

 

 

FLIRTING IN CARS

 

 

 

“This exciting tease of a novel will set your heart pounding like the best love affair. Smart, funny, sexy—I loved it!”

 

—PAMELA REDMOND SATRAN,
author of The Man I Should Have Married and Suburbanistas

 

 

 

 

 

“Flirting in Cars is a modern-day fairy tale about finding happily-ever-after where you least expect it. I couldn't put it down.”

 

—KAREN QUINN,
author of The Ivy Chronicles and Wife in the Fast Lane

 

 

 

 

 

“Alisa Kwitney's cross-cultural love story is intelligent, funny, and sexy.”

 

—THELMA ADAMS, US Weekly

 

 

SEX AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

 

 

 

“The romance between Kat and Magnus is, except for the CIA part, true-to-life and achingly bittersweet. Kwitney even gives them one of the sexiest scenes involving two forty-somethings since The Thomas Crown Affair.”

 

—DEBRA PICKETT of the Chicago Sun-Times

 

 

 

 

 

“An engaging and intelligently written comedy—with a few genuinely titillating sex scenes.”

 

—Publishers Weekly

 

 

 

 

 

“Sex as a Second Language, Alisa Kwitney's smart, sassy, sexy tale of the single mom who brings in a spy from the cold and warms him up, is funny and emotionally true, a great read!”

 

—JENNIFER CRUSIE, bestselling author of Bet Me

 

 

ON THE COUCH

 

 

 

“Less concerned with embarrassing pratfalls for her neurotic heroines than many of her chick-lit sisters, Kwitney still wants them to find love, and not a little bit of sex. The single girl here is Marlowe, a Manhattan psychologist with divorced parents providing her with distant affection and a trust fund. Joe is the NYPD detective with more crime smarts than tact…. The relationship is fitful, playful and exciting, then cold and hostile, swinging wildly about as each tries to figure out what game the other is playing, all the while trying to find the killer to boot. Kwitney deserves credit for not throwing out illogical roadblocks, and there's a refreshing absence of stock best-friend characters.”

 

—Kirkus Reviews

 

 

 

 

 

“A teasingly good read. Sexy, sassy and a little kinky. A different take on Manhattan life—more handcuffs than cocktails.”

 

—CAROLE MATTHEWS, USA Today bestselling author

 

 

DOES SHE OR DOESN'T SHE?

 

 

 

“Alisa Kwitney is my guilty plea sure.”

 

—NEIL GAIMAN,
Hugo Award-winning author of American Gods and
New York Times bestselling author of Coraline

 

 

 

 

 

“Witty, charming, funny and real, Alisa Kwitney brings a fresh voice to Chick-Lit and Romance!”

 

—JENNIFER CRUSIE, New York Times bestselling author

 

 

 

 

 

“Sharp, sassy, and sexy.”

 

—CARLY PHILLIPS, New York Times bestselling author

 

 

THE DOMINANT BLONDE

 

 

 

“Her search for the perfect boyfriend and the perfect hair-color is delightful. It belongs right up there with all the legally and naturally blonde bombshells of our time.”

 

—LIZ SMITH, nationally syndicated columnist

 

 

 

 

 

BY ALISA SHECKLEY WRITING AS ALISA KWITNEY

Flirting in Cars
Sex as a Second Language
On the Couch
Does She or Doesn't She?
The Dominant Blonde
Till the Fat Lady Sings

GRAPHIC NOVELS BY ALISA SHECKLEY
WRITING AS ALISA KWITNEY

Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold
Vertigo Visions: Art from the Cutting Edge of Comics
Sandman: King of Dreams
Token

This one's for Mark,
who feeds me,
keeps me sane,
and reminds me that I say
there's no way I can make
my deadline every year.

 

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

I wrote this book five long years ago and was helped in my research by a lovely young veterinary intern at a large teaching hospital of veterinary medicine in Manhattan. I've lost the intern's name, and the hospital asked me to lose theirs when I mentioned werewolves and mad scientists. But thank you both all the same. More recently, one of my local vets at the Pine Plains Veterinary Practice, Dorraine Waldow, helped me sort out my (fictional) sedatives.

 

This is the first novel I've written using the name on my birth certificate; I'd like to thank my father, the late, great science fiction writer and grand master of irony Robert Sheckley, for all the writing advice he gave me over the years.

 

My mother, Ziva, believed in this book from the first, but I might never have taken it out of its drawer if Neil Gaiman hadn't prodded me by asking what had become of it, and if my marvelous and motivational agent, Meg Ruley, hadn't believed in it and helped find it a home. Liz Scheier, my editor, inspired me to go back into this world and helped me to realize how much larger and more complex it really was, and Holly Harrison kept me from getting lost, freaking out, and forgetting how everything tied together.

 

Kim Canez and my son, Matthew, have braved snow, rain, ticks, mud, snakes, and a very aggressive fawn to go dog walking with me in the woods, which is vital when writing a wolfish book; Liz Maverick and the rest of my bat guano posse helped keep me a prisoner of Starbuck's until it was written. Last but not least, a special mention for my wolf-loving daughter, Elinor, who slammed her pinky finger in the car door just as my agent was telling me about Ballantine's offer, thereby sealing my fate in blood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ONE

There are many different Manhattans. Which one you happen to live in depends partly on geography and partly on perception. I live on the Upper West Side, in the midst of an eccentric animal kingdom.

 

In my Manhattan, people like their animals big: aristocratic hunting dogs with wide, soft mouths, overfed guard dogs and pit bull mixes, sled dogs that have kept the look of a wolf about them. These are large animals for large apartments: six-room prewars, with a couple of children and possibly a weekend home in the Hamptons. Nobody has time to go jogging with the dog anymore, and the nanny refuses to pick up feces from the sidewalk, so a walker is hired.

 

Elsewhere, on the East Side, are toy breeds with their adorably hydrocephalic heads. The owners are older; the children have grown up and been replaced by skittish canine midgets with the appeal of perpetual infancy. Downtown are the elaborately designed fashion victims, entrancingly ugly breeds with faces wreathed in wrinkles, their noses squashed up between their eyes. They are dragged behind their fit and fabulous owners, panting from their deformed jaws.

 

And then there are the exotics: lizards, parrots, rabbits, the odd squirrel monkey or de-glanded skunk. I don't usually see these outside of work, but then, they're not my specialty: They belong to someone else's Manhattan. So I suppose I was a little startled to see the man with the baby barn owl on his shoulder, although not as surprised as the other subway riders.

 

The man had a quality of alertness about him that didn't quite seem to match his appearance. He had that look you get from sleeping rough: T-shirt not quite clean, the worn cotton molded to his wiry chest. I noticed that the man's eyes were a pale hazel, almost yellow, as he kept moving his gaze around the subway car, careful not to make eye contact with anyone. I wondered where he had found the little gray bird, which had sunk into itself, but stopped myself from asking him. Most people think they're rescuing owlets when all they're really doing is stealing the baby on its first day out of the nest. My friend Lilliana can explain this to people and they'll frown and say they had no idea, but when I open my mouth, people tend to get red in the face and become defensive.

 

The little owl huddled closer to the man's neck and he reached back and patted it, shifting his other hand from strap to pole. A blond businesswoman sidled away and I saw the man notice.

 

Then, for a moment, the man met my eyes, a half-smile on his lips, as if he had something amusing to impart. I turned away from him, because I don't approve of people wearing animals as accessories. Particularly wild creatures, which are far more delicate than you might think.

 

I knew this because we get the odd raptor at the Animal Medical Institute. We're the only veterinary ser vice in the New York area that caters to exotics, so we're pretty much the only game in town if your anaconda loses its appetite or your parrot breaks its foot. We ‘ r e also the only place in the tristate area that can do dialysis on cats and the best place to give your dog chemo. But somehow I didn't think the raggedy man was taking his little pal in for a checkup. I was wondering if I owed it to the owl to intervene when the subway screeched to a stop and the doors opened. There was a reshuffling of bodies and I realized that the person pressing against my back had gotten off, giving me room to breathe again. Reflexively, I lifted my hand to adjust my pocketbook strap, only to find that there was no pocketbook there.

 

I felt a moment of disorientation. Was it possible that I'd left home without it? Had it fallen to the floor? And then, on the heels of these thoughts, the realization: Someone had stolen my bag. I said it out loud, half in disbelief, just as the subway gave a hiss and a jolt, the doors closed, and the train began to move again.

 

I looked around, wildly, as if I expected the thief to still be there. But of course, whoever it was would have gotten off the train. Around me, people were watching with various degrees of sympathy, alarm, and disinterest. I met the raggedy man's eyes and he gave a little shrug as if to say, Sorry, but it wasn't me.

 

A heavyset woman with a vast ledge of a bosom patted my shoulder, and there were murmurs from the other women and some of the men. “What happened?” “Somebody stole her bag.” “Didn't you feel anything?”

 

I shook my head. “I didn't feel a thing.” I felt a rising panic as my fellow passengers checked their own bags and briefcases and wallets. But they were fine, while I was suddenly stranded without money, credit cards, cell phone, and keys. I tried to remember how much cash I'd been carrying. Crap. I'd just gone to the bank yesterday after work.

 

“They carry knives,” said a thin teenage boy, his oversized jeans hanging off his hips and revealing white boxers. “They just cut right through the strap, and bam—emergency surgery on your finances.” He looked at me with mock concern, aglow with his own cleverness. For a moment, I suspected the cocky boy of being the pickpocket, and then I turned, feeling the owl man regarding me with heavily lidded eyes and a cynical half-smile. He knew what I was thinking, and I could hear his judgment of me as if he'd said it out loud: racist. As if the color of the boy's skin had anything to do with my momentary suspicion.

 

Flushed and embarrassed, I turned away. I realized with a clench of anger that the man had been observing me for a while—he might even have witnessed my being robbed without bothering to warn me. My heart pounding, I felt a wild urge to accuse him. He met my eyes as if he could read this thought as well, and then the subway lurched to a stop. Without actually making a decision, I found myself pushing through the crowd to get off.

 

On the subway platform, I tried to think things through. I was already going to be late for rounds, but I couldn't wait till lunchtime to cancel all my credit cards. And whoever had taken my bag had my house keys along with my address. I had to tell my husband to change our locks.

 

Reflexively, I reached for my cell phone before remembering that of course, I'd lost that, too. I made my way back to the station agent, who was hiding behind the Plexiglas, pretending to be deaf.

 

“I'm sorry,” I said, trying to keep the note of hysteria out of my voice, “but my purse was just stolen. Do you think I could borrow your phone to make a local call?”

 

“I'll make the call for you,” said the woman, apparently thinking this was some elaborate ruse to bilk the MTA. Maybe I should have gone for more hysteria. I told her my number and waited as she lethargically dialed my home.

 

“Nobody's home.” She regarded me with blank indifference.

 

“He is home, he's just sleeping the sleep of the seriously jet-lagged. Can you please try again?” My husband had just come back from Romania last night looking ill from fatigue, a good fifteen pounds thinner than I'd ever seen him before.

 

The station agent stared at me for a moment, as if weighing her options. In the end, she redialed the number, using a pen to protect her inch-long nails.

 

Hunter, I prayed, please wake up and answer the phone. I hadn't been expecting him for another week, and had nearly jumped out of my skin when he walked in the door as I was eating day-old Thai food from the carton with my fingers. He'd been sick with a stomach bug, he'd explained, and had changed his ticket. No, he didn't feel up to giving me the details just yet, and yes, if he needed a doctor he'd call one. His tone implied we were having an argument, and mine implied I hadn't noticed.

 

I'd gone to bed at eleven and actually fallen asleep fairly quickly, an unusual occurrence for me. I had no idea when Hunter joined me, but at three A.M., when I woke up, he was on my right, snoring lightly from his attractively once-broken nose. For a moment I had wished him gone again, so I could pamper my chronic insomnia without restraint—turning the lights on, surfing the television, eating breakfast cereal in bed.

 

Then he had spooned his body around mine, a rare intimacy, and I had felt his warm breath on the back of my neck. Savoring the closeness, I had remained motionless while my left arm fell asleep and he began to snore again. I hated to bother him now, and knew he'd probably be irritated at first, but he'd understand once I explained what had happened.

 

“Still not home,” said the station agent, hanging up the phone. “You want to talk to the police about the theft of your personal possessions?”

 

“No,” I said, disconsolate. “Could you just let me back through the turnstile so I can go home?”

 

The station agent buzzed me through and I retraced my steps in a sort of daze, making my way to the downtown platform, then to the crosstown shuttle, which took me back to the West Side, where I could catch the Broadway local. It took me three trains and forty minutes during rush hour to get to work each day. Most of my fellow interns had taken housing near the center, but Hunter hadn't wanted to give up our brownstone apartment on the Upper West Side.

 

Wishing that there were some way to call my team to let them know why I was so late, I emerged from the subway and headed for Riverside Drive. An unseasonably cool wind was whipping in from the water. It had been the coolest summer in over one hundred years, and now fall seemed ready to bring the curtain down on a lackluster performance.

 

As I quickened my pace to a jog, I felt a twinge of cramp low in my left ovary. I was about twenty-five days into my cycle, but I'm not all that regular; I'm one of those women who skip months, then get their periods every three weeks for a while, then start going into a six-week cycle. Still, I felt that sort of warm looseness in my abdomen that usually heralds the start of things.

 

My gynecologist said that I might find it difficult to become pregnant. I told my husband this last year and he said, It's probably for the best. I should explain that there is a history of mental illness in Hunter's family: His mother's sister became schizophrenic at the age of nineteen and his mother committed suicide when he was a teenager. Hunter is moody, the kind of moody people expect from writers, but he always says he's not sure he should have children. He spent most of his adolescence wondering if one day madness would explode in him like a time bomb; and I think he worries that if we had a baby, he'd spend the next twenty years waiting to see what might detonate in his offspring.

 

I suppose I'm ambivalent about becoming a mother. I'm not sure I have the vocation for it, and I think my own mother is a good example of what can happen if you have a child without one. I mean, Mom wasn't quite in the “Mommie Dearest” league, but she did like making scenes. Maybe it's something to do with being a film actress. Perhaps movie stars, even “B” ones, shouldn't propagate.

 

In any case, my schedule wouldn't allow for a baby. I had this year of internship to get through, a residency to apply for, and a husband who was away more often than he was home.

 

Nervously checking my watch, I turned the corner on Eighty-fourth Street and finally reached our building.

 

Hunter and I had spent the past four years living in one of those modest turn-of-the-century mansions that had been subdivided into small apartments, so that the whole structure is like one big dysfunctional family. We lived on the second floor, in the only apartment without a bricked-in fireplace. But we did have a balcony of which we were inordinately proud, even if it was barely large enough to accommodate two chairs and a portable mini-barbecue.

 

What our building didn't have, of course, was a doorman to let me in. I buzzed our intercom repeatedly, to no avail. I tried the friendly couple of middle-aged men in the garden apartment first, and then the angry family who had the nicer duplex above us. Also not at home.

 

Great. Sinking down onto a floor littered with Chinese take-out menus, I blinked back tears of frustration. Clearly, I should have just gone on to work, but now I was here and unless Hunter let me in I didn't have the money to get back to the Animal Medical Institute.

 

Of course, I could hike a few miles across the park, but I was probably going to get my period today. Call me prudish, but I don't feel comfortable going up to other women in a quest for pads or tampons. I don't even like sitting in a stall talking to another woman, particularly if there's going to be any grunting involved. I blame my mother. She was so intent on my not being ashamed of my body and its functions that she instilled in me a fiercely beleaguered sense of privacy.

 

And Hunter was in there. All I had to do was rouse him out of his coma. Feeling more than a little desperate, I pressed all the buzzers one last time, then went outside and shouted “Hunter, it's me” at the top of my lungs while searching around for a rock to throw against our window.

 

And then, looking up at our balcony, I thought: I can just climb up there. Not by going straight up our building—the first floor was faced with 1940s flat yellow brickwork, which didn't offer a hand-or foothold. But the Victorians who'd designed our neighbors' place hadn't worried much about crime. Whoever had built the entrance had arranged foot-long concrete rectangles into a pattern around the black iron-and-glass doors, giving the house a vaguely medieval look. Right under their first-floor terrace was a little black iron lamp, a perfect handhold. Their terrace was only two feet away from ours.

 

A twelve-year-old would have seen this in an instant. Most adults stop looking at the world as something that can be climbed, unless they're of the breaking-and-entering persuasion.

 

But back before I sold my soul to the Animal Medical Institute, I used to do some rock climbing at the Chelsea Piers gym. I'm good at anything that requires methodical attention to detail, and I actually got to the point where I was developing a few muscles in my legs and rear, and was looking a bit less like a loaf of white bread. Then AMI accepted my application for an internship and I lost all semblance of a life.

 

The only obstacle to climbing the ten feet to our balcony was my outfit. Hunter had always said that he had never known a woman who spent as much money on sacks as I did, but I like comfortable clothes in rich fabrics, the sort of thing you could wear to a medieval fair and pass as a rich guildsman's wife. That day I happened to be wearing my Eileen Fisher wide-legged pants in soft brown cotton paired with a deep gold cotton tunic, not ideal for scaling the facades of buildings, even small ones. I tucked my pant legs into my socks and looked around to make sure no one was watching. Luckily, ours is pretty much a block of opera singers and older people, so the police don't cruise by too often.

 

It was almost as easy as I had thought. The footholds were generous, almost two inches wide, and I was about twelve feet up, right under the balcony, when I reached the lamp. It was bolted in, solid enough to step on. I suppose I looked like one of those graceless little girls you see in the playground, heaving their sturdy little bodies up the monkey bars, but I got myself over the wrought-iron terrace railing. There was only one bad moment, where I had to balance on the neighbors' railing before jumping over the two feet onto our balcony. I was about to step over when I heard a dog barking.

 

I looked down to see an overexcited dachshund with a dapper old man attached. The man looked familiar, and I realized he lived in our building. You couldn't have come home two minutes earlier, I thought sourly.

 

“And what do you think you're doing, young woman?”

 

“It's my apartment,” I said. “I live here.” His dog kept yapping.

 

“I should call the police!”

 

“Please don't. I'm Abra Barrow, your neighbor in 2B.”

 

“Wait a minute, don't I know you?” He pointed his finger up at me. “The girl. The actress.”

 

“The vet. I'm a vet. My husband didn't hear the phone, and I lost my key.”

 

“The what?”

 

“The key! Lost the key!”

 

“Thickey?”

 

Another old man, thinner and bearded, joined the first. “What's she doing? Breaking and entering?”

 

“Nah, nah, it's her apartment. Husband trouble.”

 

“Hey! You! Girl!” The bearded man sounded angry.

 

“Look, it's really okay …” I started to turn to face him better, lost my grip, and reached over to grab the railing of our balcony. Unfortunately, this left me in the awkward position of having my feet on one building and my hands on the other.

 

“Get your leg over! Your right leg! These kids don't know how to climb trees, is the problem.”

 

“As a boy, I climbed trees, houses, barns. In Ukraine.” The dachshund gave a little bark of agreement.

 

I stepped over to our balcony, then turned back to the men, who had now been joined by an elderly woman in a fox-trimmed winter coat.

 

“I'm safe, you guys. Thanks.”

 

“Next time ask us, we'll let you in. Sidney has all the keys to the apartments in that building,” said the bearded man. I waved. People think the city is big and impersonal. The suburbs, where I grew up, are big and impersonal. The city is a patchwork of tiny provincial villages without clear borders, each with its own yenta, postmodern revolutionary, and idiot.

 

From the street, I heard the old woman ask, “What's that girl doing up there, Grisha?”

 

“She's a veterinarian. With husband problems.”

 

Maybe I was the town idiot.

 

I tried our window. Thank God, we'd left it open. I shoved the glass up another foot and climbed inside, and for a moment I stood in our living room, feeling very good about myself. I was the prince scaling Rapunzel's tower without a hair rope; I was Robin Hood sneaking into the Sheriff's stronghold.

 

Then, with a start, I realized how very unsafe my apartment was. During the three months that Hunter had been away, I had often left the window open. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I was within harm's way whenever harm might take a notion to come find me.

 

But if a modestly athletic twenty-nine-year-old woman could climb up here and break into her own apartment, then it didn't take a big bad wolf. Anyone could get in.

 

Distracted by these thoughts, I didn't immediately notice the strange sounds coming from the bedroom. My initial thought was that Hunter was having a nightmare. He kept uttering little panting groans, punctuated by a soft whimper that sounded almost like a dog's. I walked toward the bedroom thinking, Maybe I should wake him. Then I heard the rhythmic slapping sound of flesh, and a chill of gooseflesh traveled down my neck. That wasn't the sound of Hunter having a bad dream. That was the sound of Hunter on the brink of orgasm.

 

 

TWO

My first reaction was a prickle of embarrassment and a tingle of desire. Then Hunter's breathing picked up and I thought, Wouldn't he be surprised if I just walked in there now?

 

I didn't assume, in that first moment, that there was a woman in there. That came a half-second after, when I registered the fact that Hunter had shown no interest in making love to me this morning, despite our not having seen each other for three months. But he had been sick. And I had been expecting my period, which is not something Hunter enjoys. I hadn't mentioned that I was due, but I'm pretty sure Hunter would have noticed the box of panty-liners I'd set out in the bathroom. He had a journalist's knack of always spotting the one thing you wish he'd miss.

 

There were quick, fleshy slapping noises from the bedroom, and I listened for the sound of a second panting voice. Nothing. Of course, some women are pretty quiet. I've learned to make my breathing more audible when there's something going on that I like, even though it feels a little fake. Hunter once told me I made love like a nun in war time.

 

He said it teasingly, of course.

 

There was a slight grunt, nothing theatrical, and then silence. I waited a moment in the living room, noticing the thick layer of dust on the Mexican pottery. I hadn't cleaned under the couch in a long time, either.

 

“Hunter?”

 

Silence.

 

“Hunter?”

 

Rustling sounds. “Abra? Is that you?”

 

“It's me.” I stood there, waiting.

 

“Of course. Wait a moment—” More rustling sounds. “Yeah, come in, come in.”

 

I walked in to find Hunter sitting upright against the cherry mission headboard, pale blue sheets pulled over his lap. He hadn't bothered to close the shutters. There was the faint sea-smell of fresh semen in the room. He was still breathing hard enough that his pale chest showed the deep pattern of ribs on the exhale. His dark brown hair had grown long enough to fall in his eyes and over his neck, and his brown eyes looked darker, sunk more deeply into his face. But he was a handsome man, even when looking wan and disheveled.

 

“I didn't hear you come in.” Said with no embarrassment.

 

“That's because I climbed in through the living room window.”

 

“Trying to catch me with another woman?”

 

I just looked at him.

 

“All right, let's try again. Why didn't you just use the door?”

 

“I didn't have my key. A pickpocket stole my bag and you weren't answering the phone or the buzzer.” I tried to keep my voice from sounding prim and accusatory. The way I felt.

 

“You're kidding. Poor Abra.” He gave me all his attention as he said it, and I felt myself being dragged back into the force field of his charm. Hunter has this way of listening to you so carefully that you realize that most of the people you talk to are really just waiting their turn to speak.

 

“I'm not kidding.”

 

“And you really climbed up the front of the building?” Hunter reached for his watch on the bedside table and strapped it on.

 

“Actually, I climbed the front of the building next door and came over the balcony.”

 

“Good Lord.” Hunter shook his head, admiringly. “And I suppose you worked out that this was the most logical course of action?”

 

“I needed to get some … things.”

 

“That explains it, then. By the way, your pants are kind of torn.”

 

I bent to inspect the damage, wondering how to segue into my next question. “Um, Hunter, is there—there isn't anyone else here, is there?”

 

Hunter laughed, his head nodding forward, as if he were embarrassed to meet my eyes. “What, you mean hiding in the closet? No, Abra.” He looked up. “I'm sorry about the phone. I thought it was one of those telemarketers.” Hunter patted the bed. “Come sit down.”

 

“I have to cancel my credit card and checks.”

 

“You can do that in a minute. Come over here and sit down. I can see you're upset.”

 

I sat down beside him, and he wrapped me in his arms. He wasn't even sweaty. The people in Hunter's family didn't seem to develop as many body odors as the people in mine. As he held me I noticed that all along the top of our low dresser, Hunter's wallet had hemor-rhaged business cards, loose change, dollar bills, and cigarettes, breaking the neat ranks of my perfume bottles and enameled jewelry boxes.

 

“You okay, ‘Cadabra girl?”

 

I nodded into his shoulder. “Hunter.” I tried to think of a way to put this. “Is it me?”

 

He stiffened under my hands, then slid away. “It's nothing to do with you, Abs. I'm just—it's been a difficult couple of months.”

 

It had been three months, actually. Back in early May, I'd been lying on the plastic chaise lounge we'd wedged sideways on our balcony, reading a brochure on Block Island. No cars in summer, just like a little Nantucket close to home. My internship at the Institute began in July; I'd asked Hunter if he wanted to try to get away with me in June. Sounding distracted, he had responded that he'd just gotten an idea for a piece on some mythical Romanian beastie.

 

This, roughly translated, meant, I've already bought my ticket and you won't be seeing me again till the last dead brown leaf of summer gets ready to take that final dive.

 

Hunter had spent the last few years writing articles for magazines like Outside and Backpacker. He hoped, I knew, for the kind of career-making story that meant a feature article in Vanity Fair, a book deal, movie rights, and full circle to an ongoing gig as contributing editor. All he needed was the right break—his own Everest, his personal perfect storm.

 

And that was why Hunter was intent on spending the summer with his Romanian-English phrase book instead of with me. It seemed that the existence of Europe's last surviving wolves was under serious threat. Ceau_escu's totalitarian regime, like Hitler's, had possessed a hunter's fond regard for preserving native woodlands. The Romanians figured that wealthy American and European eco-tourists might pay to see the ancient woods where their ancestors once walked in fear of trolls, dragons, and flesh-eating creatures. This was Transylvania, after all, monster country.

 

And some people will pay good money to see monsters.

 

So, while the enterprising Romanians were cutting down old-growth forest and setting up boutique hotels, the real wolves' ranges were growing ever smaller. And since wolves are a little less popular with family tourists than, say, a nice elk or eagle, the villagers weren't shy about killing the rogue that went after a local calf or sheep.

 

If it was big enough, it got called a werewolf.

 

It was a good story. It was a morality tale with a good dose of irony and a hint of B-movie Transylvanian spice. And Hunter had told it well, sitting next to me on our little Manhattan terrace.

 

Unfortunately, it was such a good story that my Transylvania-hopping husband barely found time to call me three times in as many months. Once I'd started my internship at the Institute, I'd been able to distract myself with work—I'd been assigned to Malachy Knox's medical group, which was the veterinary equivalent of special ops. There wasn't much time or opportunity to ruminate about your faraway sweetheart.

 

But now Hunter was back, which filled me with relief and gratitude, and yet also made me want to bark: Who've you been sleeping with? If only there was a way to say this without saying it. Ask it without asking.

 

“You haven't told me much about your trip yet.”

 

“Abra? You're not going to blow this whole thing out of proportion, are you?”

 

I turned to look at him. He was clipping his words, getting prepared to be angry, just in case.

 

“I just want to know why you didn't—why you didn't want—” Me. I left that last pathetic “me” unspoken.

 

Hunter sighed deeply, pulling me back into his arms. He rested his chin on the top of my head, which hurt. “Oh, Abra, I am so sick and tired and out of my head. I wouldn't have been any good for you. I just needed—I just wanted something quick and easy.”

 

“I can be quick and easy.”

 

Hunter's hands rubbed my back, moved under my shirt, and then skimmed the waistband of my pants. “You sweet girl.”

 

I felt the sting of tears and fought it. “Hunter, I need to make my calls and get to work. I'm going to be late as it is.”

 

“I could make you later.” His mouth moved down, found my ear. His breath was a little stale from sleep.

 

“Hunter.” Was this affection, or renewed lust, or pity? With Hunter, I could never tell. His mouth moved down my neck, then he lifted my shirt and slid his hand under my practical beige brassiere.

 

“God, you've still got the breasts of a thirteen-year-old virgin.” This may not have sounded like a compliment, but believe me, it was. Hunter pulled my shirt over my head, and for a moment I was caught in my long brown hair.

 

“You're never going to cut this, right?”

 

My hair nearly reaches my waist. “No.”

 

Hunter wrapped my hair around his wrist and tugged. “I've got you—you're my prisoner.”

 

I looked at him with my head back, throat bared. His dark eyes were shining now. “Is that what you want?”

 

Hunter glanced down at himself. “What do you think?”

 

We looked at each other. “All right, then.”

 

There was a pause, a beat, and then Hunter let go of my hair and yanked down my pants. “Like this? Without touching you first? Quick and easy. My prisoner.”

 

I watched his eyes. This was real. We hadn't made love in three months. The last time I'd been in his arms, his thoughts had been a thousand miles away, on the trip ahead, on the adventure of the unknown. “No,” I said carefully, whipping my head a little back and forth, making my hair move. “No, please, no.” In case he'd thought that first no had been real.

 

Hunter pinned my hands over my head. He was stronger than his wiry frame suggested. “Spread ‘em.”

 

“No.” How was this really done? With his hands holding my wrists, how could he get my legs apart if I didn't help?

 

Hunter wedged his knee in between my thighs. “I said, spread ‘em.”

 

“No.”

 

A look, almost one of anger, crossed Hunter's face, and for a moment I thought maybe I'd done something wrong. Then he transferred both wrists to one hand, and tried to use his other hand to guide himself inside me. After a moment, he gave up, looked at me again, and said, “Slave Girl, you'd better start listening to your Master.”

 

There was a touch of real anger in me. “No.”

 

Hunter sat back, trying to figure this out. This was a game of domination. How far to go? I was curious, too. And more than a little excited.

 

What he did next surprised the hell out of me. He sort of yanked me up, threw me on my stomach, and grabbed me by the back of the neck, like you would a cat. I think I was lying on the remote control; something was digging into my breast.

 

“Hunter—”

 

Our bed is a high one, and he was standing when he thrust into me. For a moment, I felt just the blunt knock of him at my entrance, and then he started to go deeper, faster, a pace set for his plea sure, not mine. There was the slap of flesh, just as I had heard it from the other room, except this time I was there beneath him. I had wanted this more than I'd let myself know.

 

“Hunter.” But he was beyond hearing, caught up in the chase. He slammed into me with a roughness I wasn't used to, hitting the place high up inside that is just this side of pain. But it wasn't pain. Not really. Because pain doesn't climb, doesn't build and build and … Hunter came too soon, with a deep moan that didn't sound like him at all. And then he collapsed on top of me.

 

Hunter kissed the back of my neck. “You okay, Slave Girl?” He put his hand between my legs. “I was too quick for you.”

 

“No, I …” He moved his fingers, and I took a breath.

 

“There? Is that it? Come on, Abra, let me take you there.”

 

I started to cry then, just a little. I would never be able to lose control this way, with Hunter watching me, waiting for my response. He moved his fingers faster, mistaking my sounds for plea sure.

 

Cheating him, cheating myself, I cried out my dissatisfaction, and he was content.

 

 

THREE

I finally arrived at work two and a half hours late. Even though I'd called to explain, I felt conspicuously guilty as I moved through the vast white labyrinth of corridors. I kept wanting to announce to the people I passed in the halls that I'd left home as quickly as I could, borrowing thirty dollars from Hunter and leaving him to call my bank and the local police office. I hadn't wasted a single moment.

 

Aside from that little aberrant time-out as a slave girl.

 

I found my medical ser vices group S.O.A.P.'ing a few of the noncriticals. Dr. Malachy Knox, the staff veterinarian in charge of our unit, was holding a limp rag of a cat with the distinctive uremic smell of kidney failure.

 

“All right,” he said, “let's see what we've got here. Now, what does the S in S.O.A.P. stand for?”

 

Sam rolled his eyes at me: Even the Institute vet techs knew the acronym for Subjective analysis, Objective data, Assessment, and Plan. But that was Malachy's style—he drawled out his questions in his plummy British accent as if he thought we were all a bit slow. Of course, in Sam's case, he might have had a point.

 

“S stands for Subjective analysis,” said Sam. “My opinion? He looks half dead.”

 

“I'd list that as unresponsive.” Malachy glanced over at me. “Welcome to morning rounds, Ms. Barrow.”

 

I flushed, realizing that he must not have received my message. “I'm so sorry I'm so late, but my pocketbook was stolen on the train.”

 

Lilliana, my favorite member of the team, gave me a sympathetic smile, while the humorless Ofer pushed his glasses up on his nose like an officious gnome. Malachy just looked at me assessingly, his hands still stroking the cat's abdomen, feeling reflexively for the state of the cat's skin, the size of its spleen, its bowel loops.

 

As Malachy described what he was doing, Sam kept watching the older man intently as if he were expecting some sleight of hand. Even though Sam hulked a full seven inches over Malachy, and both men wore the AMI uniform of white lab coats and khakis, even a casual observer would have known which one was in charge.

 

The question of late was whether he would remain so. Dr. Malachy Knox, a.k.a. “Mad Mal,” was the Institute's resident rock star, a brilliant researcher with a reputation for thinking outside the box and using unorthodox methodologies. In vet school, I had studied his infamous experiments transplanting the brains of rhesus monkeys, and had been torn between horror and awe at the implications of his work. More recently, he had been involved in isolating the so-called lycanthropy virus, a rare disorder that caused some individuals' cells to behave like fetal or stem cells, rendering them capable of radical shifts in form and function. Despite the name, the virus did not actually turn the host into a wolf—or, at least, that was the prevailing wisdom. Malachy himself would only say that the virus manifested itself very differently in different hosts, and that canid DNA was among the most plastic in the animal kingdom. He also liked to point out that humans and wolves had been associating with each other since the days when our own DNA hadn't yet been fixed in its current arrangement.

 

I wasn't entirely sure what Malachy had done that had resulted in his ouster from the research unit and had brought him down to the far humbler position of, as he put it, “shepherding yearlings around.” But what ever it was, it had affected his health as well as his career.

 

Underneath his wildly curling black hair, Malachy's craggy face was pallid and drawn, and where his wrists were visible under his lab coat, they appeared almost skeletal. I knew for a fact that he was forty-six, but he looked a good decade older.

 

“Well, Ms. Barrow,” said Malachy, bringing my attention back to the here and now, “I can only assume that your current state of vague disinterest with our feline patient is the result of your brush with the city's underbelly. Although a countertheory might involve the fact that your husband has just returned from a long trip. He was in Romania, researching the legendary Un-wolves, was he not?”

 

What ever was wrong with Malachy Knox clearly did not affect his intelligence. He had gotten my message, I realized. He had just wanted to keep me off-balance.

 

“Yes,” I said, “Hunter was looking into the stories about giant wolves.”

 

“I'm sorry,” said Ofer, not sounding it, “but what could it possibly matter if her husband is wasting his time looking for vampires in Transylvania? Shouldn't we be concentrating on our patient?” He pointed with one stubby-fingered hand, indicated the limp cat lying glassy-eyed on the examining table.

 

“Not vampires, Ofer—lycanthropes.” Malachy wrote the word out on the whiteboard behind him with a dry erase pen. “Although many people confuse the Greek vrykolakas with the Slavic vrcolac, the former was supposed to be a sort of undead creature, not unlike a vampire, while I've heard the vrcolac variously described as a wolf demon or a wizard with shapeshifting abilities. The pricolici, on the other hand, are large, wolflike creatures inhabited by human souls—Unwolves, or, more commonly, werewolves.”

 

Malachy's blue eyes seemed to glow; I had never seen him so animated. Behind our staff leader's back, Sam pointed a finger at his temple and twirled it, indicating his opinion of Malachy's mental state.

 

“Of course, I would be insane if I believed that, Sam,” Malachy said without turning around, making it clear he knew what Sam was doing. “I suspect that what the Romanians have are two distinct genetic strains of the lycanthropy virus. What I wouldn't give to get my hands on some tissue samples.” He dragged his hand through his already unkempt hair. “I kept trying to convince the board that I needed a research grant to go to the Carpathian Mountains, but of course all that got derailed.”

 

I exchanged a glance with Lilliana. This was the first time Malachy had alluded to the mysterious event that had precipitated his removal from the research department. “Which was why I was so pleased,” Malachy went on, a small smile playing about his thin lips, “when I learned that your husband was going there.”

 

Confused, I stroked the sick cat on the table, and a clump of matted fur came away in my hand. “I didn't realize that you were so interested. I mean—your research is medical, while Hunter's field is more sociological.”

 

“My dear girl, of course I'm interested. Here, hold our patient for a moment.” I put my hand on the dehydrated cat while Malachy turned to the computer on a nearby desk and tapped out a few commands. As he waited for the cat's X-rays to appear on the screen, Malachy said, “Not interested!” He gave a derisive snort. “Honestly, Ms. Barrow, did you think that my experiments with the lycanthropy virus had no bearing on my selection of interns?”

 

I felt as if I'd been slapped. “Are you saying—was that why I was chosen for this group?” I expected him to deny it, but instead, he raised his eyebrows.

 

“Oh, for Christ's sake. Don't overreact. Ah,” he said, as the cat's X-rays appeared on the computer screen, “there we go. Okay, kids, take a look and tell me what you notice.” As the others gathered around the screen, Malachy glanced at me sideways. “You're not going to sulk, now, are you? Obviously, you're a gifted veterinarian, but so were many applicants. And unlike Ofer here, you have no background in neurology.”

 

It was as if he'd figured out all of my secret fears and doubts and confirmed them. Worse still, he had confirmed them in a tone of voice so casual it implied that I, like everyone around me, should have been aware of my limited potential. I was the diligent, wonky grind, not the natural talent.

 

No you're not, said a stubborn little voice inside me. You have talent and drive. Don't let him define you. He's British upper class. They excel at only two things: gardening and disdain.

 

“I graduated near the top of my class at Tufts,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest. Nobody was paying any attention to the X-ray, or to the cat, who was seizing this opportunity to attempt to slide off the table. Holding him gently by the scruff, I went on. “My recommendations were glowing. If the only reason why you took me on was because of my husband's research, how do you explain your justification for choosing Lilliana? She's not even a veterinarian.”

 

Lilliana had been plucked from the Institute's social work externship program, which had struck Sam, Ofer, and myself as more than a little peculiar. As far as we were concerned, the social workers were around to keep our patients' owners from asking us questions that really had no answers, and to help them work through their confusion and grief. They weren't supposed to be a part of the medical team, or to be included in our decision-making pro cess. Mad Mal was known for thinking outside the box, of course, but privately I had wondered whether he had chosen Lilliana just for the sake of doing something unexpected.

 

Still, the moment the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Lilliana was brilliant, and my friend. The truth was, she had helped us make good decisions—she was extremely adept at anticipating an owner's reaction and helping us frame our responses accordingly. But I had to know if all my pride in being on Malachy's team was misguided.

 

“Ms. Jones has a degree in social neuroscience, as well as complete fluency in the facial action coding system. In addition,” Malachy said, with a slightly wry expression, “I recall her making a very persuasive argument while I was feeling distinctly under the weather.”

 

“You said something about my counterbalancing your lack of people skills,” said Lilliana, including me in her smile.

 

Malachy rubbed his chin, considering. “Entirely plausible. And, of course, you're an aesthetically pleasing individual. That may have unconsciously factored into my decision.” Lilliana had once volunteered that she had a Russian mother and an Ethiopian father. I had no idea what her parents looked like, but Lilli had the kind of subtle, willowy, doe-eyed beauty that charms other women as much as it does men.

 

Sam cleared his throat. “What about me?”

 

“What, indeed,” said Malachy, not bothering to look in his direction. Sam's mother owned an airline, and, presumably, she had donated heavily to various causes dear to the internship committee's hearts. “Bringing us back to the subject of wolves, we had some excitement with our hybrid while you were out, Ms. Barrow.”

 

It took me a moment to follow this abrupt change of topic. Two days earlier, a hard blond lady with biker tattoos had brought in a very lanky, nervous young dog. She said that she was visiting from out of town, and that her dog, Pia, had been attacked by a pit bull in the park.

 

I had examined a laceration on Pia's paw, and asked if she had recently been given a rabies vaccine. I added that Pia looked to be at least half wolf, and that there was some discussion over whether that particular vaccine was safe in wolves. Before Biker Lady replied, I added that every state has a different law concerning wolf hybrids: In New York, they're considered dangerous wildlife.

 

At this point, Pia's owner became very flustered. I think she would have taken her dog back home then, except that the poor animal winced when I palpated her abdomen, indicating possible internal injuries. Biker Lady agreed to leave her dog with us overnight. That was two days ago, and we had no contact number, which was worrisome. Because the Animal Medical Institute is a large teaching hospital, a lot of people assume that we charge discounted rates. We don't.

 

If Pia's owner had discovered this and realized she couldn't afford to pay us, she might not come back for her animal. And a suspected wolf hybrid was not the kind of dog that could be adopted out. If her owner didn't come back for her, she was going to wind up getting euthanized. And Pia was fine; X-rays had shown that her sore abdomen was just the result of some superficial bruising.

 

I tried to keep my voice even. “What happened to Pia?”

 

“According to Sam, she had, and I quote, ‘a major freak-out.' He was attempting to get a bone marrow sample from the chocolate lab in the cage next to her, and Pia just started howling her head off.”

 

“Maybe she didn't like your technique,” suggested Ofer.

 

Sam flushed. “Listen, you poison dwarf, I didn't do anything wrong. There's something wrong with that animal, and you know it.”

 

“Of course there's something wrong,” drawled Malachy. “She's sick and she's nervous. You will, presumably, have to deal with other nervous canines in the future, unless you plan on restricting your practice to healthy animals.”

 

Malachy gestured to the cat, which I was still holding. “In any case, Sam will take over your patient while you head up to the fourth floor. Maybe you'll have better luck getting the bone marrow sample. Lilliana, you'd better try to track down the hybrid's owner. After Pia's little serenade, we have been instructed to remove her from the Institute within the next twenty-hour hours. Now, Sam, let's try again to see if you can spot anything unusual in these X-rays.”

 

Lilliana motioned to me and we left Sam to Malachy's tender mercies.

 

“So,” I said, trying to clear my head as we waited by the elevator banks, “what exactly happened to Pia?”

 

“I'm not entirely sure. But whatever it was, everyone in the building heard her little call of the wild, and the board responded by letting us know that we are not licensed to treat potentially dangerous wildlife.”

 

The elevator doors slid open and we went inside. For a moment, I just watched as the numbers of the various floors lit up in succession, mulling over Pia's situation. “Lilliana? Do you think Pia's owner intends to come back for her?”

 

“Absolutely. I told Malachy that there is no way on earth that she is abandoning that animal.”

 

“How can you be so sure, Lilli?” I wasn't challenging her; I was merely curious. Lilliana's gift for reading people was like mine for reading X-rays.

 

Lilliana furrowed her brow. “It's hard to explain. I just can tell—Pia's a person to her, not a pet. I was going to ask you: if I help you hold Brownie for the bone marrow test, could you help me scan Pia for a microchip?”

 

“You must be a mind reader.”

 

Lilliana gave me a startled glance. “I wish.” The elevator stopped on our floor, and just before the doors slid open, Lilliana said, “The question is, if she isn't chipped, how do we keep Malachy from taking her home and experimenting on her?”

 

Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to me that Malachy might try to continue his research independently, but of course, knowing the man, it made perfect sense. I kept silent as we got off the elevator and another group of interns got on, not wanting to be overheard discussing our staff group leader, the mad scientist.

 

Once we were walking down the brightly lit hallway, I said, “I guess I could take Pia home for a few days and ask my husband to look after her while I'm at work.”

 

“Would he do that?”

 

“I'm sure he would,” I said. “Or, at least, I think he would. He does get a little funny when he's trying to write—doesn't like distractions.” Worried that this cast Hunter in a negative light, I added, “But I think he'd be okay taking care of a dog for a few days.” Lilliana was silent for a moment, the only sound the staccato beat of her heels on the hard floor. “On the other hand,” I said, trying to make a joke out of the whole thing, “if Malachy infects Pia with the lycanthropy virus and she turns human, she could sue him for malpractice.”

 

We rounded a corner and Lilliana nodded to an intern from another group who was walking in the opposite direction. Unlike me, she seemed to know everyone at the Institute. “Pia doesn't have the killer instinct. Turn that dog into a woman and she'll come down with a case of puppy love and follow him around.”

 

“Wait,” I said with mock-seriousness, “maybe we should really examine the possibility that Mal's engineering beast people. Take a close look at Ofer. Check out the monobrow. And what about Sam? You can't tell me he has a full complement of human DNA.” I hesitated, then put my hand on my friend's arm. “Hey, Lilli. I'm sorry if I sounded like I was insulting you before. When I asked why Malachy had chosen you, I mean.”

 

We stopped in front of the door to Ward B and Lilliana met my eyes. “I wasn't insulted. What did you think about all that talk about Unwolves, though?”

 

“I think he's gone beautiful mind on us. Let's face it, sometimes making unexpected connections means you're a genius, and sometimes it means you need an-tipsychotics. And if you start thinking people can turn into wolves, I know which group you're in.” I inserted the card key I wore around my neck into the appropriate slot and opened the door to Ward B. “Isn't that right, Pia?”

 

The wolf hybrid flattened her ears and tried to cram herself into the rear of her cage. Most people expect wolves to be massive, fierce animals with challenging, intelligent eyes and an air of coiled menace. I don't know whether Pia was typical, but she was the spookiest, shyest, most submissive-looking canine I'd ever seen in my life. It had taken all of us working together to get her into a big floor cage alongside Brownie the chocolate Lab and Duncan, the Bouvier who'd managed to get a fork stuck in his cheek while lunging for a bite of his owner's steak.

 

The Bouvier was no longer in the cage, but Brownie was still there, wagging his tail with indiscriminate Labrador affection. Pia remained supine with her long, narrow head between her paws, wary yellow eyes darting left and right to follow our movements.

 

I'd seen Yorkies with more pluck. Malachy said it was because in nature, most wolves weren't alphas, so if you chose one randomly from a litter, the odds were better than good that you'd wind up with a very submissive animal.

 

Not the kind of pet people who breed wolves are looking for, even though nervous animals can be just as dangerous as bold ones. Sometimes more so.

 

I knelt down in front of Pia's cage and gave her my fingers to sniff. Her fur rippled in unvoiced agitation. “Hey, girl,” I said as her muzzle wrinkled in a snarl.

 

Lilliana knelt down beside me. “That looks vicious, but it means back off, right?”

 

“In dog-speak, she's telling me she's nervous rather than aggressive. Easy, girl, easy.” While I contemplated my next move, I heard a deep, mournful bark from the other side of the wall. It sounded like Duncan, waking up in recovery. Pia scrabbled in her cage, trying to back herself into the corner, and I breathed in deeply, catching a strong smell of antiseptic and the deeper, muskier scent of flesh and fear.

 

I moved over to Brownie, opening his cage and caressing his big head. “You big lug,” I said, feeling guilty at the trusting look in the Lab's big, dark eyes. Even if I wasn't as clumsy as Sam, I was going to have to hurt Brownie. In order to get a bone marrow sample, you have to really screw the drill in to get to the deep tissue. Taking bone marrow is painful, even with a local. But there's always a risk associated with giving general anesthesia, and Brownie wasn't a youngster.

 

“You know what,” I said to Lilliana. “Let's move Brownie next door, so he won't make any sound that upsets Pia.”

 

Lilliana and I slipped the rope leash over Brownie's head and walked him over to the smaller room across the hall. It took all of our strength to lift Brownie onto the table, and I waited for a moment to get my energy back before administering the local and getting the drill in place. Brownie was a big, fleshy boy, and I had to use my body weight as leverage. Once I knew I had the drill in deep enough, I inserted the syringe. “I'm sorry,” I said, as the dog whined deep in his throat.

 

“We're almost done,” said Lilliana, her tone almost hypnotically soothing. “Perfect, Abra.”

 

I pulled the sample out and the dog snapped his head around toward me, then licked his mouth quickly as if he'd never really intended to bite.

 

“I know, boy, I know you didn't mean it.” I gave Brownie a last pat before walking around the operating table. I started to lay out glass slides on the instrument tray.

 

Lilliana shook her head admiringly. “You were in and out. He didn't have time to complain.”

 

“I wish.”

 

Lilliana watched as I placed a drop of blood on each of the slides I'd set out. When we were done, she helped me get Brownie down on the floor. “You know,” she said, “Malachy really does respect you.”

 

“Are you joking? He just told me that he hired me because my husband is writing about werewolves. Excuse me,” I corrected myself, “Unwolves.”

 

Lilliana touched my hand. “I know what he said, but his face told a different story.”

 

“Mal said you'd studied some sort of face reading system?”

 

Lilliana nodded. “It's called FACS—the Facial Action Coding System. It's basically an index of microexpressions that transcend cultural differences and slip out beneath conscious control. For example, when Malachy was talking about Sam, I saw a flicker of contempt. When he mentioned Ofer's background in neuroscience, his face remained neutral. But when he talked to you, he smiled—just for a fraction of a second, but it was a real smile.”

 

“Hmm,” I said as we reached the door to Ward B. “And what did his face reveal about you, I wonder.”

 

Lilliana's eyes sparkled with amusement. “I intimidate him, actually. Hey, I forgot to tell you about the man who came in earlier with a baby owl.”

 

“You're kidding!” I was just about to tell Lilliana about my encounter with the man and the owl on the subway when we opened the doors to Ward B and discovered that the day's excitement wasn't over.

 

Pia was gone.

 

 

FOUR

Everyone else went to look for our missing patient. I went to the bathroom.

 

I'd started to bleed right after Hunter and I made love. Just a little spotting, but I knew I'd need to check on things in a little while. I suppose every veterinary and medical student goes through a hypochondriacal phase. Mine wasn't too bad; I was only frightened of getting rabies from a bite, contracting a little flesh-eating bacteria on a wound, or dying of toxic shock after forgetting I had a tampon in for twenty-four hours.

 

That may sound disgusting, but let me tell you, after being on your feet for forty-eight sleep-deprived hours, you're liable to forget a lot of things that aren't written on a chart. Which is why I tend to use sanitary pads, messy as they are.

 

So I opened the door to the bathroom and walked back to the farthest stall—the big, disabled one.

 

There, crouched beside the toilet, was Pia, the dun triangles of her ears pressed flat to her head. The scruffy owl man from the subway was kneeling beside her.

 

I think I gave a quick little huff of surprise and squeaked, “This is the ladies' room!”

 

Pia growled.

 

“Quiet, now.” The man glanced down at the dog, then back up at me with a rueful smile. “Bit of a sissy, this one.”

 

I said nothing, and the man stood up. “Well, now,” he said, “I admit this looks a bit peculiar, but I can explain.” He ran a nervous hand through his graying auburn hair, which was cut in the kind of close-crop that looks fashionable on a man in a good suit of clothes and vaguely institutional on a man in dirt-stained jeans and a cheap white T-shirt.

 

“So explain.”

 

Pia growled, low in her throat.

 

“Hush, girl. This place makes her nervous,” he said apologetically.

 

“Yes, I heard she started howling earlier this morning.” I tentatively held out my hand for Pia to sniff, still hesitant to meet the man's eyes. A thought occurred to me. “My colleagues thought she was scared of what was happening to another dog, but I'm wondering if it had something to do with you.” Oh, smart thing to say, Abra. What if the man's crazy? I'd forgotten the first rule of New York City: Don't antagonize the crazy man.

 

“She sure did raise a fuss when she smelled me. Expect she wanted out of here.” The man ruffled the fur at the back of Pia's neck. He had a gentle, sure touch and the dog seemed to accept it without too much hunching of the shoulders. “You work here?” He pointed to my white lab coat.

 

“Yes.” Without thinking, I crouched down to give Pia a pat and then realized I had just done something incredibly stupid. Now I had placed myself at this stranger's feet. Worse still, I was crouching in a bathroom stall, and the floor's cleanliness didn't hold up under close inspection. The man was looking at me with an odd, slightly preoccupied expression, his head cocked a little to one side, his nostrils flaring.

 

Hang on, did I smell? I looked down and continued stroking Pia as if this thought had never crossed my mind. When the stranger spoke, his voice was so low and soft it took me a moment to register what he'd said.

 

“I make you nervous.”

 

I straightened up, then realized that I was now standing too close to this man. “Well, a little.” I forced myself not to back up, because dogs and serial killers have an instinctive, aggressive reaction to retreat.

 

“You make me a little nervous, too.” I met his steady, amused regard and realized there was something pleasant about his looks. He had the kind of lean, high-cheekboned, weathered face I'd seen in pictures of the Depression.

 

“And why is that?”

 

“I'm kind of hoping to make my way on out of here without too much fuss, and you seem the kind of woman not to walk away from a fight.”

 

I brought up my hands reflexively. “I'm not looking for a fight …”

 

“But like I said, you're not one to back down—even from a brick wall, I imagine.” As he said this, the man moved so that now he was standing between me and the door to the bathroom stall.

 

I felt a prickle of alarm at the back of my neck. “Did you follow me home from the subway?”

 

He cocked his head to one side. “Ma'am?”

 

I shook my head. He'd come to the clinic: There was no way he could know about my climbing adventure. “Never mind. Listen, I need to know what you're doing here with this dog, Mr….”

 

“Red Mallin. Friend of Jackie Roberts, owner of this animal.” “Friend” meaning boyfriend, I assumed. He held out his hand and I took it without thinking. His skin felt unusually hot, and at the moment our palms made contact I felt an odd little jolt of awareness. I realized that we were staring at each other. I wondered if, on some animal level, it was because I'd had sex that morning. Unsatisfying sex, a little voice interpolated. There was something about the way we were standing there that seemed inappropriate. Why weren't we talking? I wasn't frightened of him any longer.

 

“So, ah, you're Dr. Abra Barrow?” His finger indicated my name badge.

 

“Yes.” My throat was dry, and I cleared it.

 

“Yes.” He seemed discomfited. “Right. Now, I was just goin' to explain—are you wearing something? Some scent?”

 

“No.”

 

“Ah.” He dropped his hand and inhaled deeply, as if trying to collect himself. Red seemed to be growing more nervous, not less, and that made no sense. I watched as a splotchy redhead's blush climbed across his cheeks.

 

“Well,” he began again. I spoke at almost the same time.

 

“So Pia isn't your dog?”

 

Red and the wolf hybrid exchanged a complicit glance. “Nope. Jackie asked me to spring her out before she got herself in some kind of trouble.”

 

I remembered Lilliana's half-joking comment about Malachy's wanting to experiment on Pia. Now that I thought about it, it had been a little strange that Malachy had wanted to keep Pia's case, as it wasn't clear that her owner could afford our ser vices. I found myself recalling Malachy's statement that he'd hired me because of my connection with Hunter's lycanthropy research and wondered: Does Malachy have some agenda with this animal?

 

On the other hand, what was this man's hidden agenda? “So why didn't Jackie Roberts come herself?”

 

Red had the ability to stand without shifting weight from foot to foot, which was something I liked. It seemed, I don't know, forthright. “Well, she thought I might be able to make a case for Pia here not being more'n a tiny bit wolf. I'm kind of an expert. See? Here's my business card.” He dug his wallet out of his back jeans pocket and extracted a cheap white card bearing a picture of a howling wolf or coyote in silhouette. I couldn't help but notice that it matched the tattoo stretched over the swell of his right bicep.

 

“Red Mallin,” he said, as if I couldn't read it for myself. “Wildlife Removal Operator.”

 

I looked at the card, then at him. “So why didn't you go up to the front desk and assert your expertise, Mr. Mallin?”

 

Red smiled, a little crookedly. “Well, I don't know. Sometimes big-city types don't exactly seem to value my opinion as much as I do.”

 

“What'd you do with the owl?”

 

“She's still here. Kind of a trade.”

 

I realized that it was mostly the graying hair that made him look older. That and the sunburn. I figured Red might still be in his late thirties. I found myself thinking that he looked like someone you might see on some reality TV shows, announcing that he was leaving his wife, the fat dyed blonde, for her sister, the emaciated dyed blonde without teeth.

 

“I probably don't want to know, but—where'd you get the owl?”

 

“Someone's attic. Listen, I swear I'm not some animal broker who goes around selling wild things to stupid people. I just want to bring this little girl back to her momma, is all. Jackie knows how to take care of her right.” Red fished a crumpled piece of paper from the pocket of his jeans. “You can call her right now if you want to check me out.”

 

“I don't have a cell phone.”

 

Red looked at me, surprised. “Well, shoot.” He appeared to have reached the end of his arguments. “I don't have one, either.”

 

“It's all right. I believe you.” The moment I said it, my stomach did a little flip. But I did believe him. He was scruffy, but he inspired trust, somehow. Pia got to her feet and actually wagged her tail twice, as if sensing the accord between us.

 

“You hear that, Pia? You're goin' home.” Red bent down to scratch behind the dog's ears while flashing me a conspirator's grin.

 

“Let me check whether the hallway's clear.” I left the stall and opened the bathroom door a crack. “It's okay,” I said. “You're good to go.”

 

Red paused by the door. “Now listen, Doc, you ever have some critter getting into your basement, go on and give me a call.”

 

I glanced down at the card in my hand. There was an e-mail address and a toll-free phone number. “I live in an apartment.”

 

Red whistled for Pia and she came to heel by his side. The dog—if that's what she was—seemed calmer than I'd ever seen her. She even wagged her tail again as she looked back at me. “See?” Red pointed with his thumb. “She's thanking you, too.”

 

“Go on,” I said with a smile.

 

His hand on the handle, Red turned around. “Sorry about your purse, Doc. I was just about to say something when you turned and froze me out.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“You know, on the train. You gave me one of those ‘Don't even think about talking to me' looks and then cold-shouldered me. So I didn't warn you.”

 

I thought about how it might have seemed from his point of view. “I'm always reading people wrong,” I said. “If you'd been a dog, I would have known you were all right the moment I met you.”

 

Red's eyes lit with amusement. “Smart about animals and stupid about people. That's what my grandfather always said about me.”

 

“Sounds like my mother talking about me.”

 

“Well.”

 

“Well.” We stood there, uncomfortable with the moment. And then Red lifted my hand to his mouth, kissed my knuckles, and left.

 

I stood there, stunned at the very physical reaction I'd had to his touch. That was a flirtation. I had committed flirtation.

 

And then I realized that the slight dampness between my legs might not all be arousal. I darted into a stall to check whether I needed a sanitary pad just as I heard someone come into the bathroom.

 

As I emerged to wash my hands, I saw that Lilliana was tucking her silky blouse into her gray wool slacks. “Hey, Abra. Any luck finding Pia?”

 

My mouth felt dry. “None.”

 

“Damn. Well, I hope it was her real owner breaking her out, and not some animal control hotshot.” She looked at me in the mirror. “Hey, are you okay?”

 

“Sure,” I said, not completely sure why I was lying to my friend, but doing it all the same. “It's just that time of the month.”

 

 

FIVE

I have always been the kind of person who wonders what things mean. You would think, as a writer, that Hunter would also tend to analyze life, but the truth is, Hunter reports on things. The moral ambiguity of his stories, which allows readers to draw their own conclusions, is what reviewers love about him. Perhaps the readers of Outside are tired of the old “hubris in the face of nature” chestnut, which is the point of most of the magazine's articles. With Hunter, you get an art school ending—the pattern of blood on the windshield as the deer limps away, the intricate whorls of the tribal tattoo on the face of a young Maori prostitute.

 

So there was no point in my asking Hunter what had precipitated the sudden change in our sex life. For several weeks after Hunter's return, we made love every day, and this unexpected second honeymoon chased every other thought from my mind. I didn't spare another thought for my strange encounter with the scruffy, auburn-haired wildlife operator. I went to work on autopilot, not even noticing that Malachy had become paler and weaker until Lilliana pointed it out. There was no more talk of Unwolves and no mention of Hunter's research. Like me, Malachy seemed to be sleepwalking through his days, and Ofer was openly lobbying for a transfer.

 

But while Malachy was in the grip of some nameless illness, I was drifting in a fugue state of reciprocal lust. Literally and figuratively, I was Hunter's slave girl, in thrall to his attention and his touch. As for my husband, he was autocratic and imaginative and more passionate than I recalled him ever being before, even in the beginning.

 

I met Hunter eight years ago, during my junior year of college. He was a senior. We were both in the Science Library, cramming for midterms. It was a late afternoon in early November and the sky outside was the kind of pale dark that always makes me feel cold and a little despondent.

 

I was feeling low for a variety of reasons. I was sleep-deprived, I had gained five pounds, and my roommate had deserted me to go have wonderful sex with a guy in another dorm. I knew it was wonderful sex because sometimes they had it in our room. My mother had sent me a card telling me she was going to volunteer at the local animal shelter for Thanksgiving and I was free to make plans with my father. My father was in Key West with his girlfriend, Moon, running the kind of hotel local people live in, paying by the week. Moon was only five years older than me, but most people assumed she was over thirty because of the dark circles under her eyes. She claimed to be psychic and knew I was a virgin without my telling her.

 

Which didn't prove a thing: Most people seemed to figure that out on their own.

 

At first I couldn't understand what the good-looking guy in the fisherman's sweater was doing. He kept looking at me with a frown on his Heathcliffian face, and then checking his watch. I had lost one of my contact lenses and was wearing the blue eyeglass frames my mother thought brought out the color of my eyes. It didn't: My eyes are gray. I figured Heathcliff wanted my seat on the little couch by the window. Or possibly he was waiting for a computer terminal and just happened to be looking at me while he scowled.

 

When he came over and dropped a note in my book, I looked up into that brooding face and thought, He must need help with chemistry. I unfolded the little strip of paper. It read: Aaggh Midterms Aggh Agggh. Want to go for a cup of coffee at the Student Center?

 

It was only my certainty that I was a momentary distraction, my utter conviction that no man that handsome would ever be seriously interested in me, that made me appear indifferent. After “Midterms Aggh” I wrote an exclamation point. Then I added, Not yet, must finish chapter. Heathcliff stood next to me, reading my edits as I wrote them.

 

—In an hour? He wrote.

 

—Sure. I was sure: Sure he'd be gone by then. But he waited the hour, glancing up at me from time to time, and I had lost all semblance of concentration by the time the big clock on the wall struck six.

 

“Ready?” There he stood, regarding me with a look that was equal parts admiration and bemusement. I felt that he was surprising himself by asking me out. I was so tense that it required a conscious effort not to twitch, blink repeatedly, or keep nodding. As we walked to the Student Center, I listened intently while Hunter told me about his major, his irritating house mates, his plans after graduation, and his dietary peculiarities.

 

It turned out that Hunter despised cheese. He called it “the corpse of milk,” quoting James Joyce. I joked that we would be a terrible couple to invite for dinner, as I was a vegetarian and basically lived on cheese. This sounded as though I assumed he would want to see me again: I burned with humiliation.

 

“Why are you a vegetarian?” Hunter and I had compromised on a meal of coffee and french fries. All around us, it seemed, thinner, prettier girls in tight black turtlenecks and perfectly tattered Levi's were drinking cappuccinos and reading annotated copies of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Only one of them wore glasses, the fake little black kind models wear when they want to look intellectual.

 

“I don't like the idea of supporting the meat industry.” I was wearing a navy sweat suit, and my hair was unwashed and rolled into a messy bun on the top of my head.

 

“All those poor little battery-raised chickens without beaks? All those innocent little overfed veal calves with ulcers on their eyes and hooves too soft to stand on?” Hunter ate another french fry.

 

“I see you've dated vegetarians before.” Before! As if this were a real date!

 

But Hunter only laughed. He had brown wavy hair that curled at the ends and wonderful dark eyes that sort of drank you in. He sat like an athlete, muscular thighs spread wide; later, I found out that he played soccer for the school team. When he took off his sweater I could see the shadow of his pectoral muscles through his thin white T-shirt. “Hey,” he said, “can I ask a personal question?”

 

“Sure,” I replied, trying to hide my nervous ness.

 

“How long is your hair when it's down?”

 

This is where I was supposed to pull out the pins and dazzle him. “To the small of my back. But it's not too clean right now.”

 

Hunter leaned back and took a swallow of coffee. “I need a cigarette,” he said. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

 

He wants to sleep with me, I thought, but by dawn he'll be back in what ever hellish frat house he lives in and I'll never hear from him again.

 

“I have to get back to the fishbowl.” Which was what we all called the Science Library.

 

“Bloody midterms.” I later learned that his family had moved to En gland when he was sixteen. Hunter had managed to retain a sort of Ralph Lauren patina of upper-middle Britishness, which was to grow even more pronounced after we moved to Manhattan.

 

Outside, on the badly lit path back to the library, Hunter stopped and gripped me by the elbows. I was dizzy with the smell of him, masculine and Marlboro-tinged, with a hint of verbena soap. “Abra. Are you at all interested in seeing me again, or am I just bugging the hell out of you?”

 

I wanted to sink my teeth into his lower lip and kiss him till there was blood. I wanted to sink down to my knees and bite him right through his jeans. Shaken by the violence of this lust, I took a moment to answer. “Interested,” I said.

 

“Good.” A grin flashed over his heavily shadowed face like a light going on. Then he lit a cigarette and became moody and unknowable again. What do you see in me, I wanted to ask. Is it the hair? Do you have a thing for virgins? Months later, I finally worked up the courage to ask him what first attracted him to me.

 

“Your confidence,” he said. “The way you just sat there in your comfortable clothes, completely consumed by your work. The way you didn't seem to need to check your watch like all the other poor slobs putting in their study time. With your hair up, and those goofy big eighties glasses, you seemed … I don't know. Like a little nun, perfectly at peace with herself.”

 

When he finally made love to me, two weeks after our first encounter, I was so unused to being touched that I kept laughing. I was so sexually inexperienced that all my erogenous zones were ticklish. I wanted to beg Hunter to be rougher with me, but he was desperately considerate. I'd ridden too many horses as a girl to bleed when he entered me, but there was a little pain as he stretched me.

 

I wanted to follow that pain wherever it would take me, but Hunter held himself back until the end, and by then there wasn't enough time to catch up.

 

“You okay, ‘Cadabra girl?”

 

“Mm,” I said, secure in his arms. After he fell asleep I touched myself between my slippery legs and conjured images stolen from my mother's old movies: the pretty young witch, writhing in sensual panic with her wrists tied to a stake, as Satan moves in, glistening with red makeup.

 

The magazines all tell you to be open and frank about what you want in bed, but this presumes a deeper confidence. I never felt completely certain of what Hunter loved in me. All I had to go by was his image of a young woman as self-possessed as a little nun.

 

My mother used to say that she hoped the sex was good, as he was likely to treat me like crap in the near future. Which was why I couldn't bring myself to ask her about the slave girl business now, even though I was dying to know: Did this mean Hunter was suddenly seeing me differently?

 

Or did it mean he wasn't seeing me at all?

 

 

SIX

Eventually, I had to admit that there was something wrong. But it took me a while. Touch-drunk from all the unaccustomed contact, I found myself able to fall asleep and stay that way for the first time since early adolescence. Forget sleeping pills; I'd discovered the real cure for insomnia—sex-induced coma.

 

Hunter started joking that it was usually the man who got tired out after making love. But I wasn't so much physically exhausted as emotionally satiated. For once in my life, my brain didn't kick into fretting mode the moment I lay down and closed my eyes. It was almost as though Hunter was taking me over by taking control—or maybe I was just learning to surrender.

 

But gradually, I became aware that there was no one sleeping beside me. Hunter's side of the bed was always empty when I went to sleep and unrumpled when I woke up. I saw signs of late-night feasting in the kitchen—dirty plates piled high in the sink, cardboard take-out containers in the garbage that hadn't been there the night before. For years, Hunter and I had agreed that he wouldn't bring meat into the apartment, but now he was binging after midnight on spare ribs and meatball grinders. To my sensitive nose, there was a faint, per sis-tent smell of dead flesh in our apartment, and even leaving the windows wide open didn't eradicate it. When I complained, Hunter laughed and said he'd have to remember to leave the garbage outside our front door.

 

He didn't apologize for breaking our agreement, and I didn't call him on it. I also didn't ask him why he was suddenly less fastidious about his person, and mine. He no longer avoided making love to me when I had my period—in fact, he reveled in the slippery, transgressive feel of it. While I had to admit that I liked this aspect of his newfound earthiness, I was less thrilled with his new habit of showering only every two or three days. His shaving became erratic as well, and my husband's dark stubble left red, raw marks on my face and inner thighs.

 

At night, I began to have vivid dreams that I could never quite remember. I knew when I first woke up that I had been in the midst of some complex drama, but all the details bled away as I came fully awake. I had vague impressions, though. A night sky in the country, brilliant with stars, the moon a huge, glowing orb until a dark cloud passed over it. My husband, pressing me down on the bed as I whimpered in fear. Malachy in his white lab coat, holding up a half-dead cat and instructing Sam, Lilliana, and Ofer that they were going to have to learn how to kill things. “Start small,” Malachy said, “with something wounded, like this fellow. Then keep challenging yourself. Go for something bigger. Work together to bring it down.” I raised my hand, asking: What about me?

 

“You're the bigger prey, of course,” Malachy explained, and everyone looked at me with renewed interest: Ah, yes, now we see it.

 

My inner life, I was discovering, was basically a B movie. Wouldn't my mother be proud.

 

Then, after a week of this, I had a dream that felt different from the others. I was back in the subway train. Pressed up against strangers, I could feel someone rubbing slowly against me. In real life, I would have been horrified and repulsed, but in this dream, the subtle touch against my back and bottom felt like waves lapping up against me, sensual and impersonal, anonymous and erotic. A male hand gripped my waist, and I thought, This is like that story by Anaïs Nin, about the woman and the stranger on the train, and I gave myself up to the illicit plea sure of it. As the stranger moved in sinuous motions against my backside, I felt my thoughts drifting to this faceless man, and then, without warning, I was that man, struggling to hold myself in check and to restrict myself to just this small necessary contact. I could feel my breathing quicken; I was losing control. And then I was back in my own body. I looked up and saw a barn owl perched on the handrail, swiveling its head a disconcerting 180 degrees to give me a long, slow wink. I realized that the man touching me wasn't a stranger—well, not a complete stranger, at any rate.

 

“Stop,” I said, trying to break free from his embrace. It felt as though recognizing him had broken some kind of spell.

 

“Hang on, sweetheart, I'm almost done,” came Red's response. He sounded like he'd been running hard.

 

“I don't think so,” I said, pushing him away. Behind me, I heard a woman gasp.

 

“He's written all over you,” said a woman, lifting my shirt up and peering at my bare back. In the dream's logic, it didn't seem peculiar that his touch had penetrated the fabric of my clothing. It didn't seem strange that I could suddenly see myself from above, my back covered with scarlet designs, like an aboriginal story or a shamanistic spell.

 

I came instantly awake, alone in the bed. The bedside clock read three A.M., and it was still completely dark outside. Swinging my feet from the bed, I padded down the hall.

 

“Hunter? Are you up?” As I checked the apartment for my husband, I wondered why I was having erotic dreams about a scruffy redneck when the only man I'd ever wanted was finally turning to me the way I'd always hoped he would.

 

But Hunter wasn't home, and though I went back to bed and forced myself to remain there, I didn't sleep any more that night. It was only in the morning, when I stepped into the shower, that I noticed the fading red marks on my back. I knew they were simply the imprint of the wrinkled sheets on my skin, but for a moment, in the mirror, they resembled arcane symbols.

 

Hunter came home just as I was leaving for work, looking sweaty and disheveled. He had gotten up early, he said, to go running.

 

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it's difficult to get someone to understand something when her marriage depends on her not understanding it. But even I was coming to recognize that a few short weeks after it had begun, my second honeymoon was coming to an end.

 

Still, I allowed myself to pretend for a little while longer that I didn't know why it was ending.

 

 

SEVEN

On Sunday, October 7, I ran out of denial time. Because I wasn't working, there was nothing to distract me from the fact of my thirtieth birthday. Like all birthdays that end in zero, this one demanded a certain amount of attention. I was entering the decade in which life decisions carry the most weight. My mother always used to say, In your twenties, you can have a first career and a first marriage that turn out to be nothing but a footnote later on. In your thirties, however, you are making your adult life. You could remake it in your forties, of course, but still, turning thirty was a very big deal.

 

Not that I expected Hunter to make a big fuss about the day.

 

He had established early on in our relationship that he felt birthday and Christmas presents were for children—grown-ups surprised each other by commemorating more inventive, personal dates. Which, to give him credit, he sometimes did—a bouquet of red roses one year to celebrate our first year of shared rent, a pair of silk pan ties the morning after he'd first seen me drunk.

 

But birthdays, even pivotal, painful ones, Hunter tended to forget. If you don't need to buy a gift, you don't mark it on your calendar—as simple as that. I suppose, if I'd asked him out to the movies, he would have taken me. But it just seemed a bit pathetic, somehow, like calling in a special favor. Far better to just let things slide by.

 

I thought I had come to terms with the absence of any special anniversarial treatment—or, as Hunter would call it, any false emotion. So maybe it was just my imagination that he seemed particularly dour that morning. He was preoccupied as he stood by the fussily percolating coffeepot and short-tempered when I asked him if he wanted toast, so I didn't bother to suggest an afternoon movie. Clearly, he was intending to spend this day as he had all the others since his return: searching the Internet for obscure books and articles on wolves, or interviewing Canadians as he worked on his seemingly endless article.

 

I'm not sure what the deal was with Canada—I guess they just have more wolf people there to interview.

 

My mother called to wish me happy birthday and asked me to take the train to see her so she could give me her gift in person. She knew about Hunter and his birthday theories, because in a weak moment I had complained about it. And if there is one thing my mother, the former B-movie star, cannot understand, it's putting up with something you don't like.

 

“Act like you have top billing or you'll never get it,” she always said. “If I'd slunk around like you do, I'd still be ‘blond vampire girl number three.' “

 

But I have watched people's faces as my mother launches into one of her tirades, and I think there may be worse things than slinking around dissatisfied. In any case, I said I would try to visit her next weekend. My father called next and told me he'd sent a check, because he wasn't sure what I needed. He spent a while telling me about his girlfriend's crazy ex-husband, and then told me to come visit soon. He didn't mention Hunter.

 

I knew my work friends wouldn't call me, as they would see me tomorrow. I had lost touch with my college and high school friends; funny how you never see that in movies—the heroine always has at least two close childhood friends, each a little fatter or crazier than herself. Sometimes there's a third, a gay man who is smarter, more stylish, and underneath more tragic than the rest. I wished for such sidekicks. I wondered if you could put in a personal ad: Straight woman seeks gay man, straight women, for walks in the park, foreign films, impromptu make overs, well-chosen gifts. No secret competitors, annual migrators, or disappearing acts need apply.

 

Or maybe what I needed was a dog. Dogs don't wake up one morning and realize that the relationship isn't working for them anymore. Dogs don't lie about what they've been doing, or leave you to go explore other options. Like their wolfish cousins, dogs love for life.

 

Feeling maudlin, I decided to go for a long walk by the boat basin in Riverside Park, to get my endorphins flowing and work the wobble out of my thighs.

 

“I'm going out,” I told Hunter.

 

“Aah,” he replied, looking briefly in my general direction. Once out the door, I found it hard to move my legs very quickly. I contemplated taking a bus to the park, but then convinced myself that the urge to move would take hold once I got my feet near some grass.

 

A few runners passed me on Riverside Drive, looking lean and serious in skintight Lycra while I churned along in my gray sweat suit. A businessman with a plastic bag on his left hand waited for his mastiff to defecate. It's moments like these that make me love the city so much: Nowhere else is the natural made to seem so unnatural.

 

On Seventy-ninth I met a woman I'd gone to high school with in the suburbs. She told me she was writing plays and designing software. She had perfect toes in strappy sandals, and her stomach bulged with chic, designer-sweatered pregnancy.

 

“Are you married?” she asked me, not waiting for a reply. “I just married a lovely man from a small village in Italy. I can't tell you how happy we are. We got married in the little white church where Paolo was christened and the whole town turned out, all the young girls wearing ribbons. I remember you used to say you weren't going to get married. I always imagined you'd wind up in a big, funky apartment with a lot of cats.”

 

“No,” I said slowly, “that's my mother. I prefer dogs.”

 

Mrs. Small Village in Italy threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, that's what I remember about you, Abra. Your killer sense of humor. Let's get together for dinner sometime soon. Here's my number.”

 

I stuffed her card into a pocket and continued walking, passing young lovers in faded jeans, laughing and talking animatedly, their faces turned to each other.

 

On the way back, I shopped for dinner at the health food store, where I saw a woman in her fifties with stark black hair and oversized tinted glasses. She looked familiar, but I couldn't place her until she ran up and hugged me, explaining that she was my father's old girlfriend Rita, and she hadn't seen me since I'd been in college, and how was the old man.

 

“He's doing all right.”

 

“Is he with someone? He's always got to be with someone, your father.”

 

“He's with someone.”

 

She shook her head. “I just have no respect for people who have to be in a relationship at any cost.”

 

Rita embraced me again, enveloping me in strong perfume. She gave me her card in case I needed a job or some public relations, and then she finally left me free to examine the onions.

 

The problem with Manhattan is, everyone comes here eventually—all your old friends, enemies, lovers, demons. People you met on vacation in Nepal will wind up beating you out for a taxi. The bully who called you “Dog Breath” all through first grade will turn up at your local diner, and will remember you didn't come to his sixth birthday party, which is where the whole trouble began. Don't come to the big city to become anonymous. New York is like Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West turns out to be the lady who didn't like your dog back in Kansas.

 

Back in the safety of my own apartment, with no one to remind me of my failings as a human and as a wife, I prepared dinner while Hunter remained focused on what ever he was writing. Because of the roiling uneasiness building inside of me, I chopped and mixed and measured with more care than usual, the way I did back in high school when I was first teaching myself to cook. Our kitchen was really a windowless nook, and from time to time I found myself gazing out into the living room. I tried not to look at the taut, defended posture of Hunter's back as he brooded over his words.

 

When there was nothing more to do with the vegetarian chili, I made my way through four sections of The New York Times waiting to see if Hunter would finish up what he was doing, but at three o'clock he was still hard at work, so I decided to take myself off to the bookstore. I returned from Barnes & Noble at seven (having glanced through a few titles in the Help, My Marriage Is Dying section at the exact moment our next-door neighbors strolled by, arm in arm, with books on gardening and Tuscany).

 

“Want some wine, Hunter?” I said to the back of his head.

 

“Mm.”

 

“Red or white?”

 

“What ever.”

 

“Or should I just put out some blotter acid?”

 

“Hah, very funny.”

 

“So you are listening.”

 

Hunter looked up from his computer, and I was reminded of a dog guarding its bone. “I'm almost done,” he said. “Two more sentences and then I can take a break.”

 

You would think, from his tone, that he was closing up after an arduous surgery and I was asking him to leave his patient bleeding on the table. Swallowing my annoyance, I opened up a bottle of Merlot.

 

I glanced up when Hunter pushed his chair back from the computer and shambled over to the dinner table, his mind clearly a thousand miles away.

 

“Okay, then, I'm here,” he said, reading over a page of notes before laying it on the couch. “What's for dinner?”

 

I served him his chili, so intent on concealing any hint of my own hurt and irritation that the first hint I had of Hunter's hurt and irritation was when he shoved his bowl away with such force that it skidded off the table and bounced against the living room wall.

 

For a moment, I just stared at the shattered pieces of pottery. Then I looked at my husband over the flame of a thick gold candle. “Mind telling me why you just did that?”

 

Hunter gave a long, deflated sigh and then buried his face in his hands. He spoke without looking at me. “I don't ask you to cook, Abra, but if you say you're going to make me chili, then for God's sake serve me something I can eat.”

 

“You are aware that I'm a vegetarian?”

 

Hunter's head came up, and he stared at me from bloodshot eyes. “Are you aware that I am fucking not? You keep saying how thin and tired I look. How sick I am.” He snarled out the word “sick” like a curse, then gestured sarcastically to my bowl. “Here, babe, build up your strength with a nice, juicy, red tomato. Genetically modified and pesticide-filled, I might add.”

 

I remained calm as Hunter got up, fumbled in his jacket pocket, and extracted a cigarette. I'd thought he'd quit over a year ago. On the exposed brick wall, the sauce was dripping slowly onto a woodcut of a hare.

 

“Hunter, I don't suppose you feel like telling me what's really bothering you?”

 

He dragged his hand through his hair. “It's just all this sitting in the apartment day after day, trying to write about nature. I'm a fucking prisoner of the Upper West Side.”

 

“Then why don't you go out more?”

 

He paused as if weighing his reply against my stupidity. “Abra, I'm writing about wilderness. And yes, I know I can take a walk in Central Park, but somehow after spending the summer in the Carpathian Mountains, crossing a grid of Gap stores and concrete to get to a sliver of toddler-infested grass is not as exciting as it once was.”

 

I looked at him with what he called my nun's face. “So you're tired of living in Manhattan, and you decide to let me know by throwing your dinner at the wall?”

 

“I didn't throw it.” Hunter shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and inhaled.

 

“I'd rather you didn't do that in here.”

 

“It tastes like shit anyway.” He ground his Marlboro out on the butter plate.

 

“Don't ruin the butter,” I said, “just because you don't like dairy products.”

 

“Christ, I've got to get out of this place. I'm dying in here, Abra, can't you see that?”

 

The stick of pale yellow butter was coated with dark ash, a crooked spear sticking out of its side. Why did I even care about that now? My hands were shaking, so I let them hold each other. “Get out of here? Do you mean out of the marriage?”

 

Hunter examined the palms of his hands as if he could read his own lifeline. “Maybe. I don't know. I need something to change.”

 

I felt my face crumple, then got it back under control. “Okay, so something in your life needs to change, and you don't know exactly what it is yet. Okay. If something's bothering you, we need to talk about it. Is it the writing? Or did something happen on the—” He was getting his jacket out of the closet before the word “trip” had left my mouth.

 

“I'm sorry, Abs,” he said as he left, “but I just can't do this now.”

 

I leaned against the open door for support. “Are you leaving me?”

 

“Don't read more into this than there is.”

 

Suddenly I wished I had bought one of those self-help books with multiple choices and single answers. Something with a title like The Caveman at Your Table or How Gone Is He? I closed the door quietly and leaned my head against it, listening to the sound of Hunter's footsteps as he bounded down the stairs and out of the building.

 

At midnight my husband returned, reeking of cigarette smoke.

 

“Where have you been?”

 

“Out.”

 

I was sitting up in bed, wearing my white cotton pajamas and tortoiseshell glasses. The remains of dinner had been cleaned away long ago: I wasn't the sort of woman to leave the tomato on the wall as a kind of unspoken recrimination.

 

Especially since Hunter would just leave it there.

 

“Out where?”

 

“Movie.”

 

In the background, I was half aware of the television's still reporting the day's disasters.

 

Hunter threw his clothes off without looking at me and climbed into bed. I was relieved he didn't feel the need to shower: That's one of the first signs of infidelity, according to The Six Signs of Infidelity by Louise Rosegarten. I had discovered this earlier, during my visit to the bookstore. You also had to watch out for a new style of underwear, particularly a switch to bikini briefs. Of course, Hunter already wore bikini briefs. When he wore underwear.

 

“Which movie did you see?”

 

Hunter tossed a thick lock of brown hair out of his eyes, like a fractious horse. “Womb Raider. Rated triple X. Want to check the times?”

 

I didn't flinch. “Yes.”

 

Heaving himself dramatically out of bed, Hunter went to the back door and fished the paper out of the recycling pail. He returned to the bedroom, loudly flipping through it till he found the page, then slammed it down on the bed in front of me. We glared at each other until we both started to laugh.

 

“You didn't really go to this, did you?”

 

He was still laughing. “Why? Did you want to see it with me?”

 

The tension lifted, he pulled on his tattered robe before excusing himself and heading into the bathroom. As I waited for my husband to come back to bed, I opened up this week's New Yorker magazine and tried to come up with a caption for a wordless cartoon. There was a couple in a marriage therapist's office, being shown a tank of water. Befuddled, I looked up, startled by the chime that meant the computer was being turned on in the living room.

 

“Hunter?”

 

No response. For a long moment I just sat in bed, trying to figure out if the monster in the closet was real or a trick of shadows and imagination. Was Hunter really changing toward me, or was he just caught up in some internal drama that had everything to do with his work and nothing to do with me?

 

I walked into the living room and watched him. After a while, he turned around.

 

“Can't you sleep?”

 

“It's my birthday,” I said. I couldn't help it: I was asking for special favors.

 

“Is it? Is it? Christ, what's the date?”

 

“October seventh.”

 

“So it is. God, I'm all messed up with dates since I got back. So what are you now, twenty-nine?”

 

“Thirty.”

 

“Well, why don't we have an unbirthday dinner tomorrow. I'll bring you orchids and take you someplace absolutely fantastic, where virgins massage the beef before they serve it. We'll stay up atrociously late, go to some smoky blues bar, and tip the piano man to sing ‘Happy Birthday' with extra vibrato.”

 

“Tomorrow is Monday. I have to work.”

 

Hunter raked his hair back with his hand. “Do you? Of course you do. Aw, baby, I'm sorry. We'll find another night. Friday night? We'll do Friday. It'll be even better. Listen, I'm almost done for to night. Just give me two more minutes and I'll be in. Give you a birthday cuddle.”

 

I watched him turn, begin to work, cast an anxious, almost irritated glance over his shoulder when he saw I had not yet moved.

 

“Hunter?”

 

“What is it, Abs?” He was trying to keep the impatience from his voice, with some success.

 

“You were with someone else, weren't you?” As he opened his mouth to respond, I clarified, “Not to night. In Romania.”

 

He looked almost relieved, I thought. “In Romania,” he said, and I waited for him to continue. But he just left it there, and I thought about all the ways I could interpret those two words. They could mean, Yes, I was unfaithful in Romania, but now I am here and I am with you. Or, There is so much you don't understand about Romania that I don't know where to begin. On the other hand, they could also mean that, in some very real way, my husband was still in Romania, his whole imagination caught up in the adventure of it.

 

But, no, I was trying to analyze this away. I knew what he meant. “Who was it?” My mind raced through the possibilities. Magdalena Ionescu, the chief wolf researcher, had to be in her forties, too old for Hunter. “Was it a girl in a bar? A call girl? Who was it?” I found myself hoping that he'd been with a call girl, something that moments ago would have felt unspeakably disgusting.

 

“Listen, Abra—I don't think there's any point in rehashing all the details. It's only going to upset you, and frankly, I don't have the stomach for it. Besides, it's very American, this idea of absolute, uncompromising fidelity, with any deviation punished by an exhaustive cross-examination.” Hunter rummaged on the table for a cigarette. “In any case, sex is really the smallest part of what we have, isn't it?” He lit the cigarette and then said, “For Christ's sake, woman, don't just stand there all doe-eyed. Either slap me or get over it. I don't have patience for this victim act.”

 

And then I understood. Not a call girl. Not a random girl in a bar. “Are you in love with her?”

 

Hunter took a drag on his cigarette. “I don't know, Abra. Probably not in the way that you mean.”

 

At that moment, I think I could have walked straight off the balcony without blinking. Instead, I made myself walk into the bedroom, lay myself down on the bed, and removed my glasses. Turned the light off and tried to sleep, but only wound up staring into blurry space, tears trickling down my face and into my left ear.

 

I wanted to scream: Tell me who she was! Tell me how many times! But in a sense, the deeper betrayal was what he'd said afterward. It wasn't his extramarital affair that he felt was meaningless, it was sex with me that felt unimportant. All our passionate games had been nothing more than a distraction for Hunter. And he hadn't said he didn't love her.

 

I hadn't had the guts to ask if he still loved me. It was like being told I had a potentially fatal illness, and not being able to ask whether or not there was hope.

 

From the other room, I could hear the steady click of the keyboard as Hunter typed. Closing my eyes made me feel like crying; I kept hearing my mother's voice, telling me all the things that would go wrong with my marriage after the newness wore off.

 

I put my glasses back on and found the remote control. On Channel 54 I found what I didn't know I was looking for: my mother, her perfectly voluptuous size-eight figure encased in a skintight space suit, trying to kiss a poor man's Steve McQueen.

 

“I'm not what you think I am,” she warned him as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

 

“Baby, the way I feel right now, I don't care if you're really a five-headed barbatrid from the swamplands of Venus.”

 

“Well, in that case … kiss me.”

 

I settled back under the covers as my mother consumed her prey.

 

 

EIGHT

The decision to take a sick day and go visit my mother was something I began to regret before I had even arrived. All the way to Pleasantvale, I kept rethinking the moment of sleep-deprived weakness when I had made the call to work. Surely it would have been better to go in and lose myself in rounds before receiving the obligatory birthday card and cake at lunchtime. But once I had made the call, I couldn't unsick myself, and the idea of staying home all day to be ignored by Hunter felt too much like self-inflicted torture.

 

So I took a cab to 125^th Street and waited for a train on the high, rickety platform, along with a loud young mother with two small children, a middle-aged man carrying a biology textbook, and a suburban matron in her early sixties—folks who couldn't be bothered to go all the way downtown to Grand Central.

 

“My daughter said this station was safe,” confided the white suburban matron in her Burberry raincoat, “but I don't know.” She patted her lemony hair with one hand. “It seems very run-down, don't you think?” To our left, the mother screamed at her children: “You go near that edge and I'll kill you!”

 

“Bill Clinton thinks it's safe,” I said. “He has an office around here.”

 

“He can afford to.”

 

I laughed. “I'm going to see my mother in Pleasant-vale. That's scarier than anything you're likely to meet around here.”

 

The woman smiled, revealing coral lipstick on one tooth. “I'm sure she'll be very happy to see you. I'm on my way to see my younger daughter's children.” She pulled a stack of photos out of her wallet. “Look, that's the three-year-old in the Easter dress I bought her last year; she's got lovely dimples just like my daughter had. And that's the five-year-old; she takes after the father's side—they all have that hard-to-manage Italian hair.”

 

The train arrived, saving me. I moved far back, away from the chatty lady in the expensive raincoat. There was no way to explain to her that my mother would not be happy to see me. My mother was not like other mothers: Cats and dogs were her dimpled favorite grandchildren, and I was the unfortunate inheritor of my father's bad genes.

 

Of course, if I'd said my mother's name, the lady would probably have gone into verbal overdrive. As Piper LeFever, my mother made six films between 1974 and 1979, the year I was born. She'd appeared in Beware the Cat! (as the youngest of three sexy witches terrorizing a small village in medieval En gland) and The Harpy (as a morsel for a big vulture), and had made quite an impression on one reviewer in Lucrezia Cyborgia (as a dangerously beautiful alien in a skintight space suit). Her first starring role had been in Blood of Egypt (as a mousy librarian who is really a powerful priestess of the ancient Sect of Anubis), which was followed by Satan's Bride and El Castillo de los Monstros, her last movie. El Castillo de los Monstros was my father's big break. Only twenty-five at the time, he replaced Domingo Santos as director after my mother drove the man to a nervous breakdown. My father, who is Spanish, knew how to handle temperamental women. He made my mother pregnant and finished the picture right on schedule.

 

I'm not exactly sure why my parents left the West Coast, or even whose idea it was to buy a splendid Spanish-style house in Pleasantvale, thirty minutes from Manhattan. I guess it must have been one of those rare decisions they came to jointly, without arguing. In any case, it was a strange sort of place to grow up in, a great fanciful villa modeled on El Greco's house in southern Spain, smack-dab in the middle of a resolutely working-class neighborhood. The house, which was built in the 1920s, had come first, and the neighborhood had grown up around it like the forest of thorns around Sleeping Beauty's castle.

 

At first there was enough room for two warring spouses, a suit of armor in the formal dining hall, two wolfhounds, and a wandering tribe of cats, not to mention a Roman fountain in the central courtyard. But then Dad's career as a director died completely with the ill-fated mid-eighties television series I Married a Werewolf and the arrangement soon became unbearable. The fact that the show was about a henpecked husband married to a temperamental lycanthrope may also have had something to do with it. Reviewers called it a misogynistic Bewitched.

 

Already the proud owner of six cats, two dogs, and a ferret, my mother decided to turn our house into Beast Castle, a nonprofit organization for housing unwanted animals. Like Brigitte Bardot, Piper LeFever likes to say that she gave her youth to men and her mature, wise, nurturing, unselfish prime to animals.

 

My father likes to say that he gave his youth to Piper LeFever, which was like living with an animal.

 

At the Pleasantvale station, I got up, smiled wanly at the chatty lady, and began walking the familiar suburban route backward through time. It takes only ten minutes to walk to my mother's house—five to cover the town's tiny commercial center, five to make your way past the run-down houses that border my mother's property. I walked past the pizza place, the dry cleaners, the deli; I passed two small, fenced-in yards and the stationery shop where lotto tickets were sold. Every step felt like it took a year off my life—twenty-nine, twenty-eight, past the sensible age of twenty-five when insurance companies will let you rent their cars, past twenty-one and the right to have white wine at a restaurant, back before the legal age to vote, to have sex, to smoke a cigarette.

 

Nothing but a thin line of sidewalk now, the grass growing too long around the pavement. There were the same old lovely maple and pine trees and a bit of broken glass and empty beer cans to mark my way.

 

I was somewhere around fifteen or sixteen, anxious and rebellious, when I arrived at the curved black iron gates of Beast Castle: An Animal Refuge.