The Wolves of Fairmount Park Read Online Free PDF Page B

it.”
    â€œYes you were. You might tell yourself something else standing here now, but you were.” His voice was quiet now, and his eyes flicked around the street to see if anyone could see them. “Don’t come back here. I know you mean well or whatever, but you’re not . . .”
    â€œNot welcome here. I know.”
    â€œNo, it’s that you’re not
you
anymore. You’re just this collection of urges and twitches, and I can’t have that around my home.” He didn’t raise his voice, and when he said it he patted his brother on the arm. No hard feelings. “I don’t know you anymore. I know what happened to you, about Maire and how she got. But I can’t help that now, and I can’t help you.”
    Brendan heard a noise from inside and turned to see Kathleen moving in the living room. When he turned again, Orlando was gone.
    Kathleen came out, her head down, distracted. She looked at him, narrowing her eyes in the dark. “What’s going on? What’s that?” She pointed to the frame in his hand.
    â€œIt’s a picture of my mother.”
    There was a small buzzing noise and a faint click as the streetlights came on, and it was night.
    .   .   .
    Orlando walked up the stairs of the boardinghouse off Green Lane, moving slowly, listening to the hollow sound of his feet on the stairs and thinking about his brother and his mother and trying to remember when he wanted to be something. Trying to remember if there was a time when there did seem to be a way forward.
    He was on the clock. It had been most of the day since he’d fixed, and he needed to get high. He should eat, he knew, and he was thirsty, but that could all wait. Right now there were pulses of electricity shooting in his arms and legs and a hot line running from his temple to his jaw that was his jones waking up.
    When he got upstairs, the door was ajar and Zoe was inside. There was music on, old Interpol she loved. “Turn On the Bright Lights.” She was dressed from the restaurant in the black skirt and the bright orange shirt she hated because it made her skin itch. He put his arms around her without a sound and she stiffened at first, saying his name like it was a question, and then falling into it, pressing her hands into his back and letting his head fall to her shoulder.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, babe?”
    He thought about what to tell her, and she drew back to see his eyes. He lifted a shoulder, let it drop.
    â€œMy brother, Brendan, his son got hurt. Shot, up the street at the place the Nortes run.” The Nortes were the Tres Nortes, Three Norths, a mostly Dominican crew from up in Kensington.
    â€œJesus, Orlando, is he dead?”
    â€œNo, but he’s in a coma.”
    â€œDid you see your brother?”
    â€œYeah.” He almost never talked about his family to her, and they were just names. She had a big family out on the Main Line that she hadn’t seen in a year. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled open Zoe’s purse. “What do you have? Do you have anything?”
    â€œYeah, baby, but we got to talk about that.”
    He rifled in her purse for a minute, then dumped it out and picked through compacts and lipstick, keys and loose coins, and worked two tiny glassine bags out. He held them up and one was ripped and empty and he looked at her darkly.
    â€œNo,” she said, “I didn’t.”
    â€œWe talked about this.”
    â€œWhat did I just fucking say? I didn’t shoot, I just snorted it, Jesus. Fucking Julian was in my shit all day, I couldn’t do nothing right. It was just to take the edge off, you know? Motherfucker thinks being manager makes him God. So I couldn’t wait, okay? I didn’t know when you were fucking coming home.”
    Orlando shucked off his jacket and pulled his works out of a hole in the lining. He opened the nightstand drawer and took out a bent spoon and