Before the Fire, The Wolves Howl

The girls are here again, the teenagers who undo me with a single look. They press their library cards to the glass, and I unbolt the door, averting my gaze as they slip past.

I shelve botanical books beside the table where they’ve set themselves up for the afternoon. I need to finish this section, though I’d hoped to avoid it until they left. The girls pull out notebooks and makeup and mirrors and little figurines they arrange in a ring around them, all drawn from their worn backpacks. One backpack looks charred, though who knows if it’s from the last fire in Olmstead or something else. The brunette applies eyeshadow to the blonde. I keep my head down, lift the thickest book, and slide it into place. I inhale slowly and smile at the spine like I’ve accomplished something. A forty-five-year-old proud of herself for putting a book away near some teenagers—what has the world come to?

What I can’t ignore is the crinkle of unwrapping food and the smell of some fried soy product. Why do these girls eat in here? Oh wait, I know: because young people don’t respect the one sanctuary left in this town or the person who keeps it alive. Me. I glance outside—the orange haze and community guards pacing the perimeter—to give me strength. There are bigger problems in this world.

I roll my cart to the edge of their table, my only barrier between us. It’s the same table where I tutor an old man in reading some evenings when he isn’t guarding his enclosure. I haven’t seen him in a month, and I try not to think about it as I tighten my fists around the cart’s handles and clear my throat. The girls don’t look at me, and I don’t know which I feel first, embarrassment or relief.

I pause. There’s five of them today instead of the usual four. The girl on the far side I don’t recognise, and I know everyone who’s been given a library card, since I’m the one who issues them. She’s younger than the others, probably thirteen or fourteen. She must have slipped in with the older ones, and I’d been avoiding their eyes, so I didn’t notice. I bite my lip, heat rising up my neck.

“Girls, I know you’ve seen the ‘No Food or Drink’ sign.” The four of them blink up at me, their faces hard and always on the edge of some insult I can only imagine (old cow, wretched drag, ugly bitch). But they never speak except to deny. 

“We’re not eating.” The brunette says, flicking back her long, unkempt hair. Then she looks out the window, suddenly, as if she hears something, and furrows her brow.

I look to the new one. It’s as if she’s trying to be inconspicuous, hidden at the edge of the table, except she’s smiling widely at me with large teeth in her tiny mouth. Then she starts laughing. Not in a cruel way, and not even at me. She gazes at the other girls with her eyes widened in exaggeration, as if she can’t believe she’s laughing in a library, and I see she’s just guileless, hasn’t learned the withering look of apathy her friends have mastered.

The brunette, oblivious to the eruption of laughter, shows me her empty wrapper, the blonde points to her empty container. I lift my chin and flip my hair back, greying strands and all, showing off the empty piercings lining my ears that once held multiple studs and hoops.

“I see you’ve finished eating.” I roll up my sleeves, my tattoos of a climbing ivy vine on one arm and a single fern frond around my other wrist now visible and unimpressive, both faded and stretched.

“Next time, don’t bring in any food. It’s not allowed.”

The girls glare vaguely in my direction from under lowered lids. It’s as if they can barely lift their eyes, except for the new girl, who blinks widely at me and sends me a thumbs up.   

A buzz at the door and I rush to the glass screen to scrutinise the library card and patron at the door. Katherine. I take too long to let her in, and she’s flustered, breathing heavy and red-faced.

“Those hoons,” she’s saying, taking off her light jacket and draping it over her arm. “They gave chase. They were just trying to scare me, I think, and it worked. Then Jeff shouted at them, pulled out his flare, and they ran off.” She looks at me, wild eyed. “They howled like wolves, those boys. Did you hear?”

I shake my head. I wasn’t concentrating on anything but the girls. “You think they’ll stick around?”

“Have they got anything better to do?” Katherine says, which was a fair point. “You know why they’re here.”

I nod. The ‘pack’ howls in warning before they set a fire; they want us to evacuate so they don’t need to bother with all the human damage. But maybe they’re just boys, just playing. It’s been years since we’ve had a fire in Lenmark.

We pause to listen to the muffled voices outside, a conversation between our guards Jeff and Kinley. Had the boys wanted to terrorise us or take refuge here? The two options suddenly seemed indistinguishable.

“We’re safe for now.” Katherine shrugs and follows me deeper into the library, where I’m sucked into helping a middle-aged father find a book basket weaving, and then checking the boxes of returned books for signs of silverfish. Light shifts against the drawn curtains, that same amber flicker that makes every evening look like smoke. I rearrange the shelves of the children’s books so the warped volumes lean against the straighter ones and then patch the spine of a cookbook with glue boiled from animal bones. The work is good, and I’m barely noticing the time passing, or the girls, or the whispers of noises outside that vaguely resemble howls, but I haven’t heard the sound in so long I can’t be sure. Glass bottles smashing outside only halt me for a moment as I finish sweeping out the reading room, and then I’m busy copying out torn pages of a weather almanac by hand for the man who keeps bees when I spot the table of girls leaving.

They have books under their arms.

I rush to them without hesitation and block their exit, terribly pleased with myself. “Excuse me!”

The blonde glowers. “We checked them out, wrote down the titles in your little book.”

“You’ve forgotten the covers.” I fish into the basket next to my ledger and shove a half dozen into the blonde’s hands, who looks as if she’s never seen such material before. “Put each book in one of these.”

The brunette rolls her eyes. For a moment, they huddle around the books, arranging each one into a separate bag. I take a step back, my arms folded around my chest, and decide to push my luck. “The cloths protect from the weather. This is how we keep our books in good condition for everyone to borrow.”

The four of them scowl in the general direction of my shoulders. Heaven forbid they look me in the eye. At once I notice their friend is missing and then I hear it, proper now and undeniable. It’s as if the howls are caught on the wind, and the wind is racing closer.

I scan for the younger one, and then the brunette shouts, “See ya, Lark.” Even at that volume, it comes out flat.

“Be careful, girls.” I say. “Stay together.” But they’re already out the door.

I sweep the rooms until I find Lark sitting in the children’s corner looking through a stack of picture books. My heart speed up. I should have confronted her earlier. Plus, without the older girls, without a group, it’s not safe for her to leave. I walk over to her.

“How are you getting home?”

The girl smiles and shrugs. “I don’t know. Dad and I just moved to Lenmark. I’m from Olmstead.”

I nod. “I’ll make some calls and try to find you a place for the night.” Maybe Jeff or Katherine could bring her to their home.

“Don’t be mad,” Lark continues. “It was Lux’s idea. I snuck behind her while you were looking away.” She grins. “Hey, you’re really nice for looking after this place.”

“Even when I have to tell your friends off?” Lark stares at me like she doesn’t understand. “This is my job,” I say.

“You get paid?” She mouths, “Wow.”

I don’t explain that my payment is getting to live here while the people of Lenmark bring me meals. I survive better than most with this arrangement, unless a fire destroys the whole town.

“I’m Lark.” She puts out her hand.

“Helen.”

She places the book she was holding on a shelf and stands beside me. “Can I help you close up?”

I look up and the clock shows me I’ve forgotten to make the fifteen minutes until closing time announcement. Now there’s five minutes. I hastily make the announcement and am about to make a sweep of the fiction section when Lark comes up to me, a book in her hand.

“My brother would have liked this one.” She holds up a book with a crocodile on the cover.

“No crocs around here,” I say, dumbly, because I don’t want to know what happened to her brother.

Katherine sweeps past and I wish her good night. She’ll go home with Jeff, and I decide it’s too much to ask her to take Lark too. Katherine takes hold of my wrist. “They’re just hoons, but keep your emergency bag beside you. We’ll figure this out tomorrow.”

I don’t want to say, They got Olmstead, and it’s our turn next. So I don’t.

I give her a hug and turn back to Lark. Together we shelve the kids’ books, and then I show her how to shove scrap metal rods through the door handles to lock them. We drag mismatched curtains and patched blankets across the windows to block the streetlight glare and wrap the damaged books in cloth scavenged from old shirts to keep the dust off. I decide to let the mice live for another night and don’t bother to get out the stale bread or set the traps.

All the while, I can’t tell if I hear the howling or not, if it’s still those boys or they’re long gone and it’s actual wolves.

I heat up the beans and rice Jeff brought in that morning and scoop a bowlful for Lark. She’s delighted, and it’s truly dark by the time we finish.

I roll out my mat, and the spare too. Lark yawns.

“You know,” she begins and I just know she thinks she’s at a sleepover and is going to talk all night, and I don’t half mind. “Lux’s got that cancer that everyone’s getting, and Elara’s Dad beats her up sometimes, and yeah, Sol, she’s just mean.” I imagine Lark’s putting her hand to her mouth. I can’t see her in the dark, but I can hear her giggle.

“I’m sorry they’re going through all that,” I say, and it’s still inside but outside there’s that howling, in the distance, and then a banging against the far side of the library.

“I didn’t have any friends before them,” Lark continues as if the noise doesn’t disturb her, or as if she just isn’t afraid. I turn onto my side to face her.

“Ms. Baker confused my name with Lux and so we sat together one day, and then she introduced me to the others, said I could eat lunch with them and everything.” Lark yawns again.

“They sound like really good friends,” I say, and kind of mean it.

“They act tough but they’re really afraid. Lux won’t leave the house without us now and Elara screamed when she heard a wolf howl this morning, when we got to Ms. Baker’s, but it was only her brother, teasing.”

“Then why do they look at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like they scheming to skin me alive.”

Lark laughs but doesn’t answer. We sit there for a long time, neither sleeping, neither saying a word. And there are no more howls.

“So,” Lark breaks our silence and I nearly jump. “How do I get a job like this when I’m older?”

I sigh, hoping this library will still be standing when Lark is an adult. “I used to work at the university, the one in the old town. I was Head of Facilities, which is a fancy way of saying I was a groundskeeper. The leader of the university used to live in this house, and she filled it with books. She left it to the community, what was left of us, and asked me to look after it.” I heard she died last year.

The howls are back again, and the windows rattle.

Lark reaches out to hold my hand. She squeezes my fingertips and I can see the whites of her large eyes even in the dark, and I hold my breath as the howls come closer. I think of the girls, Lux and Elara and Sol, how beautiful their names are, how soft and golden their eyeshadow looked in the afternoon light, how carefully they slipped the books into their cloths, and I picture them huddled together in a bedroom, sleeping side by side, safe. “I’m glad I’m here with you,” Lark says. “You’re like me. We’re not afraid of anything.”