When Stiles was twelve, after it all went down and there was nothing left to do but put things in boxes and then give the boxes away (or pretend to, and hide small boxes in the top of the closet, and big boxes under the bed, and the sewing basket in the closet under the stairs, and some of her jewelry wrapped carefully in a plastic bag and some old newspaper and finally, closest to the bright stones, an old cotton dishrag, and stuff it in the back of the freezer behind the Bagel Bites), he found a collar. It was an old leather collar for a big dog, creaking with age, and it was closed so tightly that he couldn’t pry it open, not even when he slid his short fingernails under the rough stitching around the edges. It was like it was glued shut. They’d never had a dog.
He found it in a wooden chest in the basement, one with his mother’s name carved on the inside of the lid, and a faded pattern of little flowers painted around the edges. There were other things in there, letters and a few books, some old broken china and a cloth doll, but the collar caught his eye because it seemed so out of place. All his mother’s things were delicate, floral, as light and transparent as the dust motes that made him sneeze. This didn’t look like it was hers, but here it was, in the chest with her name on it, with the little flowers painted around the edges.
He showed the collar to his father, who took it, frowning, and turned it over in his hands.
"I don’t know, kid," Dad said. “Maybe she brought it with her. I’ve never seen it before. Where’d you get this, anyway?"
"One of the boxes." (He’d pushed the chest into a corner of the attic and stacked other boxes on top of it, the cardboard ones labeled “Christmas" and “Table Linen (fancy!!)" and “Taxes, 1994," and put a broken electric fan on top, just in case.)
"Put it with the other stuff," Dad said. But he didn’t give it back immediately. He turned it over in his hands again and squinted at it like he knew he should recognize it, but didn’t.
Stiles pulled the collar out of his father’s hands slowly and replaced it with the cup of coffee he was supposed to pretend didn’t smell like nail polish remover.
He put the collar in his bottom drawer, under his old jeans, and forgot about it.
(No he didn’t.)
* * *
When Stiles was fourteen, he had a sudden rush of understanding about the collar, which made him sit up in bed and go “Oh. Oh, God, gross," late on a Wednesday night, and he had to drink half a bottle of Nyquil just to get back to sleep.
(But that wasn’t it.)
* * *
When he was seventeen, desperately digging through the attic for his old baseball gear, his father’s hunting rifle, a fucking Ginsu knife set, anything, he found the chest again, but he ignored it in favor of the golf clubs leaning against the air conditioning duct and an old spade, wickedly sharp, from when his mother kept roses. He went back later, though, wet hair sticking to his forehead and his rubbed-raw skin still smelling faintly of blood and forest, and dug through the chest slowly, lifting out the letters first. They were mostly in Polish, but he recognized a few words, most of the names, and his grandmother’s crabbed handwriting. He had to hold them carefully so they wouldn’t shred or fall to pieces; his mother had been one of those people who folded all her letters into their own envelopes like in a Jane Austen adaptation on PBS, and the creases were so thin he could see his own skin straight through them. His grandmother had written about him and his father, about his mother’s sister who lived in Oregon, and something that included the words tree, love, and hound, as well as a recipe for kielbasa. He wasn’t sure about hound, though, since the word was actually lajdak, which meant “scoundrel" as well as “hound." (He knew that because his grandmother shouted it at his father every time he set foot in her dingy, onion-smelling house.)
The books were old, too, definitely older than his mother, probably even older than his grandmother, who was still stubbornly clinging to life out in Redding. In one of them he found a list of names four pages long written into the front of the book, almost like a family Bible. The leather on the book was as old and creaky as the collar he still kept in the bottom drawer, but it was warm to the touch, which was weird, since it was February and he could see his breath up in the unheated attic. The last name on the list was his mother’s. He took the books downstairs and put them in his nightstand, slipping the thin stack of letters under the cover of the biggest book, the one with the names.
For the first time since he thought he’d figured out what was up with the collar, he took it out again, turning it over in his hands the way his father had. Now that he saw it again, it looked too old, too unused to be… what he’d thought it was, which was more than a little relief. Also for the first time, he noticed it had little flowers embossed on it — not on the outside, which was still warm to the touch, although that could be the central heating. The flowers were on the inside, intricate little details set into the leather. He thought they might be the same ones that were painted on the chest.
(Later, when he found his Polish-English dictionary stuffed into the junk drawer of his desk, he looked up “wolf"on a whim and got: wilk, the general term, meaning wolf, German Shepherd, or straggler; kobieciarz, which technically meant wolf but mostly meant womanizer; jeść łapczywie, a verb that meant gobble; and finally, oddly, dysonans: dissonance, discord, disharmony, and, of course, wolf.)