Free Saint Peter’s Wolf by Michael Cadnum Page B

diplomatically.
    â€œWe never got to know each other.”
    A shrug, but not a dismissive shrug. He managed to make it kind: these things happen.
    I put my hand on his shoulder, and felt how small he still was, how slight his skeleton, how far from being adult. A child, I realized, is a treasure. I had missed my chance to know him. His boyhood would be finished, soon. He was already on his way to becoming a consumer, which is what most adults gradually become. He would be another human being with a bank account and favorite products. He would think of happiness as the power to make unlimited purchases. He was slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do.
    These plastic figures were not human, I saw, but fantasy creatures, warrior animals of some sort. “You’re a great kid,” I said, and found myself so moved I was unable to say anything more. What a fool I had been. I should have shared my life with this boy.
    When the change comes, it can come very quickly.
    Our life had become a list, and the list was now all checked off. Only once was there a sign of emotion from Cherry, when the pen she was using to add and subtract things from the list was, for a moment, lost.
    Cherry and Carliss left me on a Saturday morning. A Bekins van rumbled up to the curb, and Cherry watched them load her boxes into the great, dark emptiness. We did not bicker over what she would take because, realizing how unfair and irrational she had always been, she was careful to be unnaturally civilized.
    I was even proud of this. We are being entirely rational, I thought. I would, I believed, always like something about Cherry. She baffled me, troubled me, and even still delighted me as she marched from room to room directing the two overweight men to take up boxes which they could easily have discovered for themselves. But my affection now had a frame around it, a certain detachment. She would no longer partake of my daily life. I was like someone who had given up drinking Scotch—the pleasure now was a part of the past.
    Besides, now I had Johanna. This was the thought I allowed myself to articulate to myself. There was another thought that moved me as well, but which I kept half-secret from my consciousness: now I had the fangs.
    Cherry had given me the name of a lawyer, and I had turned it over to the old family attorney I had known since boyhood, and it was all so intelligent and calm that despite my growing detachment toward her I still sometimes wanted to grab her and tell her that she was the woman I had, until so recently, loved.
    But I didn’t. I was surprised at the pain I felt as they drove away in Cherry’s Mercedes, following the van that would take them to Orr’s house in the Marina, where they would all embark on their new lives, like handsome, healthy pilgrims with too much money.
    Carliss had the sense—or the courage—to look back at me. He lifted his hand, his fingers spread, a gesture that meant, universally, both hail and farewell.
    My own arm lifted, and then dropped. I took a deep breath. Here he is, I thought, the rational man, about to continue his upward climb through life.
    I had taken to phoning Johanna in the evenings. The stated purpose was always to ask after Belinda’s health. Belinda was something of a medical wonder, and a mere three weeks after the accident she was limping about, and even managing to chew a tossed tennis ball or two. She no longer needed the chalky yellow pills, and as Belinda’s health increased so did Johanna’s apparent confidence in me, as though she began to associate me not with the accident, but with the recovery.
    The evening after Cherry left me I went to a book signing on Polk Street. The gathering celebrated the publication of a book of French criticism which Johanna had translated. There was the essayist, a beaky man with tufts of black hair in ears and nostrils, and an elegant raw silk suit. I was jealous of him at once, and let