Read Online Starfall by Michael Griffo - Free Book Online Page B

Louis.
    â€œGallegos woke up.”
    This news should thrill me; it should relieve me of the guilt I’ve been feeling these past few days, but there’s something in Louis’s expression that gives me pause. He has more to say.
    â€œHe’s going to be fine,” he adds.
    That can’t be all. Louis looks the way my father used to, when right behind his words lay the truth, but it was a truth he didn’t fully understand. Barnaby senses it too. I watch my brother from across the kitchen table, waiting for him to swallow his food, because I’ve learned that my brother’s natural tendency is not to hide, so I know he’s going to ask the question I’m dying to ask.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, Louis?”
    Turning his back to us to wash his hands at the kitchen sink, Louis shakes his head and mumbles an almost incoherent nothing. We know he’s lying, but Arla and I are too afraid to push him any further. Barnaby isn’t.
    â€œThen why do you look like Gallegos died instead of woke up from his coma?”
    Louis takes his time. He turns off the water faucet, pulls the kitchen towel from its magnetic ring on the refrigerator door, wipes his hands dry, and then slowly folds the towel and puts it back in its holding place. Deliberate actions that no one interrupts because we all know Louis is searching for the best words to answer Barnaby’s question. And those words appear to be foreign to him.
    â€œBecause he woke up afraid,” Louis finally says.
    I feel my chest heave, and I put my hand up to my mouth for no other reason than to quiet the sound of my breathing.
    â€œWhat do you mean he woke up afraid?” Barnaby asks. “That doesn’t make sense.”
    It does if you know the last thing he saw before he passed out and slipped into unconsciousness, the eyes of a girl on the face of a wolf.
    â€œI know, Barn. It really doesn’t,” Louis replies, grabbing a plate from the cabinet above the sink and sitting down at the table. “Some disorientation I can understand, but not fear. He’s trained for hand-to-hand combat and dangerous situations. He’s a cop after all, and I don’t know why he isn’t acting like one.”
    The snarktastic teenager in me wants to say, “That’s ironic, Louis, since it took my father’s death to make you start acting like a cop.” But the inquisitive wolf inside of me wins out.
    â€œHas he said anything?” I ask. “Has he explained why he’s so afraid?”
    Shoveling a huge chunk of leftover meatloaf into his mouth, Louis half-chews and half-swallows the meat. A wolf-memory is triggered, and a sea of saliva rises up like waves against my teeth. In my mind’s eye I see the saliva dripping from my lips and over my chin to hang in the air, and I drink almost the whole glass of my iced tea before I transform into an unsightly mess right here at the table. It almost prevents me from seeing that Louis is trying desperately to avoid my question.
    â€œDaddy,” Arla says. “What did Gallegos say?”
    Resting his forehead in the palm of his left hand, Louis repeats Gallegos’s words without looking at us. “He said he was afraid of the eyes.”
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?” Arla prods.
    Louis looks at Arla, and it’s clear that he doesn’t want to share this information, but it’s burdensome and making him weary. He needs to lighten his load by letting some of it roll off his tongue. “He said the eyes didn’t look like they belonged to an animal,” he relays. “He said they looked like they were the eyes of a girl.”
    Louis shrugs his shoulders and then exhales loudly with his lips shut tight; he has nothing more to say. When he leaves the table I finally look over to my brother and see that he’s rereading the cover of the Three W . He pores over the headline one last time before he lifts his head and