Second Nature Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  Praise for SECOND NATURE and Alice Hoffman...

  “A rich and satisfying concoction ... [A] modern fairy tale, full of insights into the battle between instinct and upbringing, desire and conformity.” —BOOKLIST

  “Hoffman is a prolific and fine-tuned writer ... Everywhere within the larger structure of this book, in niches such beauty flourishes.”

  —WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

  “Iridescent prose, taut narrative suspense, alluring atmosphere, vivid characters.”

  —BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

  “A phenomenally romantic tale.”

  —GLAMOUR

  “Another page-turner ... Second Nature is first-rate storytelling.”

  —CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

  “Beautifully written, suspenseful and thought-provoking.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Hoffman gets inside her characters and manages to make them all sympathetic and often downright touching ... a riveting novel.”

  —NEWSDAY

  “Lyrical ... richly ambiguous.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “Once again, Hoffman stirs up the unlikely with the ordinary and seasons it, expertly, deliciously, with our darkest desires.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “A wise and gracious reminder that maybe what we really want is simpler than we think.”

  —CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

  “Hoffman is an endlessly fascinating writer.”

  —DAYTON DAILY NEWS

  “Alice Hoffman takes seemingly ordinary lives and lets us see and feel extraordinary things.”

  —AMY TAN

  “She is a born storyteller.”

  —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  “Showing the magic that lies below the surface of everyday life is just what we hope for in a satisfying novel, and that’s what Ms. Hoffman gives us every time.”

  —BALTIMORE SUN

  “Hoffman’s novels get better and better.”

  —SEATTLE TIMES

  “With her glorious prose and extraordinary eye for the magic of the mundane ... Alice Hoffman seems to know what it means to be a human being.”

  —SUSAN ISAACS, NEWSDAY

  “A reader is in good hands with Alice Hoffman, able to count on many pleasures. She is one of our quirkiest and most interesting novelists, and her skills and talents increase with each new book.”

  —JANE SMILEY, USA TODAY

  TURTLE MOON

  “Magnificent.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “A spectacular novel.”

  —SUSAN ISAACS, WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

  “Hard to put down ... full of characters who take hold of your heart.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

  “Beautiful.”

  —SEATTLE TIMES

  “Pure magic.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “She is a born storyteller ... and Turtle Moon is one of her best.”

  —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  PRACTICAL MAGIC

  “A beautiful, moving book about the power of love and the desires of the heart.”

  —DENVER POST

  “Splendid ... Practical Magic is one of her best novels, showing on every page her gift for touching ordinary life as if with a wand, to reveal how extraordinary life really is.”

  —NEWSWEEK

  “One of her most lyrical works ... Hoffman is at her best.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BOOK REVIEW

  “Charmingly told, and a good deal of fun.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “Written with a light hand and perfect rhythm ... Practical Magic has the pace of a fairy tale but the impact of accomplished fiction.”

  —PEOPLE

  “A sweet, sweet story that, like the best fairy tales, says more than at first it seems to.”

  —NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

  “[Hoffman] has proved once again her potency as a storyteller, combining the mundane with the fantastic in a totally engaging way.”

  —BOSTON SUNDAY HERALD

  “[A] delicious fantasy of witchcraft and love in a world where gardens smell of lemon verbena and happy endings are possible.”

  —COSMOPOLITAN

  “Hoffman’s best... readers will relish this magical tale.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  Also by Alice Hoffman

  PROPERTY OF

  THE DROWNING SEASON

  ANGEL LANDING

  WHITE HORSES

  FORTUNE’S DAUGHTER

  ILLUMINATION NIGHT

  AT RISK

  SEVENTH HEAVEN

  TURTLE MOON

  PRACTICAL MAGIC

  HERE ON EARTH

  LOCAL GIRLS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Deilhi—, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196.

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  SECOND NATURE

  A Berkley Book / published in arrangement with Property Of, Inc.

  Copyright © 1994 by Alice Hoffman.

  eISBN : 978-0-425-16163-0

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  PLEASE VISIT THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE AT

  www.alicehoffman.com

  “Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.”

  —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  ONE

  BY APRIL MOST PEOPLE HAD already forgotten about him, except for some of the nurses on the floor, who crossed themselves when they walked past his room. The guard stationed outside his door, who had little to do but read magazines and drink coffee for more than three months, bragged to his friends that on nights when there was a full moon he needed a whip and a chair just to set a dinner tray on the other side of the door. But in fact, the guard had never even dared to look around the room, where the metal bed was made up with clean white sheets every week, though it had not once been slept in.

  The man who occupied the room had no name. He refused to look anyone in the eye or, even after months of work with the speech therapists, to make any sound whatsoever, at least not in the presence of
others. Officially he was listed as patient 3119, but among themselves the staff called him the Wolf Man, although they were expressly forbidden to do so. He was underweight and had a long scar along the inside of one thigh that had healed years before but still turned purple on cold or rainy days. For two months he’d needed to wear a cast on his reconstructed foot; otherwise he was in surprisingly good health. Since he had no birthday, the staff at Kelvin Medical Center had assigned him one. They’d chipped in to buy him a sweater, blue wool, on sale at Bloomingdale’s, and one of the cooks had baked and frosted an angel food cake. But that was back in January, after he learned to use a fork and dress himself, and they’d still had hope for him. Now, they left him alone, and when he sat motionless, and sunlight came through the bars on his window, some of the nurses swore that his eyes turned yellow.

  The evening before his transfer upstate, the barber was sent to his room. There would be no need to sweep the floor after his shave and haircut; the raven that had been perching on the window ledge was waiting to dart through the bars and gather up the hair to wind into its nest. One lab technician, who had been brave enough to look through the glass window in the door, had once seen the raven eating right out of his plate while the Wolf Man calmly continued with his dinner. Now, the raven watched as the attendants strapped the Wolf Man into a metal chair and held his head back. The barber wanted no chances taken; a human bite was the most dangerous of all. In the interest of speed, he used a razor rather than scissors, and while he worked he quickly recited a blessing.

  The following morning, two attendants helped the Wolf Man into a black overcoat, which would be taken away once he settled into the State Hospital, since he’d never need it again and another patient could make use of it. The cook who had baked the angel food cake for his birthday wept. She insisted he had smiled when she lit the candles on the cake, but no one believed her, except the guard stationed at his door, who had been made so anxious by this bit of news that he took to biting his fingernails, close enough to the skin to draw blood.

  The cook had discovered that the Wolf Man would not eat meat unless it was raw. He liked his potatoes unbaked as well, and would not touch a salad or a pudding. For his last meal, an early breakfast, she had simply passed a hamburger patty over a flame for a moment. So what if uncooked meat was bad for you, and most of the patients liked cereal and toast, she wanted him to have what he liked. She had an impulse to hide a knife or a screwdriver inside the folded napkin, because she knew that as soon as he’d eaten his breakfast, he would be handcuffed, then released into the custody of a social worker from the State Hospital for the ride along the Hudson. By afternoon he would be signed into a ward from which no one was ever released. But she didn’t follow her impulse, and after the Wolf Man had his meal, the attendants dressed him and helped him into the black overcoat, then clasped the handcuffs on him, quickly, from behind, before he could fight back.

  Outside the door, the guard turned his Walkman up to the highest volume, and he slipped his sunglasses on, though the April sky threatened to storm. His friends liked to hear stories about the Wolf Man—how he crouched and circled three times before he curled up to sleep with his back against the wall, that five strong men were needed to hold him down each time they drew blood or inoculated him against measles and tetanus—and the guard was always happy to oblige. But what he never mentioned, as he drank cold beer with his friends, was that on nights when there was thunder he often heard a whimpering behind the door, a sound so pitiful it turned his bones cold and his heart inside out.

  That was the sound the trappers had heard on the last day of December, when the snow was ten feet deep and deer stuck in the drifts and froze solid. There, at the edge of northern Michigan, much of the land had never been charted and trees were so dense they blocked out the sun. Beneath the ice, streams were filled with green water. Bears in these mountains grew to seven feet, and their hides were so thick a whole hive of bees couldn’t sting them. It was dark as night on winter afternoons; trappers had to carry flashlights and leave lanterns hung on their snowmobiles in order to find their way back. Most of these men never poached enough to get caught by the rangers, and anyone looking for them would have had a difficult time. In the spring, moss appeared overnight and covered any footprints completely by morning. In winter, no one but a maniac or an experienced hunter would venture into the forest. For those men who didn’t fear the woods, there was little chance of legal action against them. Trapping was, after all, a criminal act without a witness. There was no one to hear a shotgun fired, or the peculiar cry made by a fox when a piece of cyanide-laced lamb takes effect.

  The men who found him were an uncle and nephew who had worked the forest for more than ten years and who were not nearly as greedy or cruel as some of their neighbors. They worked in silence, not with poisoned meat but with steel traps, and they were always particularly careful to stay together, even when it made sense to split up, since they had seen, several times, huge paw prints, three times as big as a dog’s. In these mountains all sorts of things were said on winter nights, some to be believed, some not. A man they knew, over in Cromley, had a wolf-skin rug on his living room floor, head and all. He told everyone he’d shot the wolf, a male of more than a hundred and ten pounds, head-on, but his wife had let it slip that he’d simply found it the spring before, dead of natural causes, preserved all winter long by the cold. Wolves were rare, even this far north; you could probably count on your fingers the ones that had come down from Canada and stayed.

  Still, their tenuous presence made for good talk and real fear. An old trapper who hadn’t been caught once in sixty years of making a living liked to scare some of the boys who were just starting out by swearing that it was possible for some wolves to become human. He’d seen it himself on a night when there was an orange hunter’s moon. A wolf was crouching down with the pack one minute and standing on two feet like a man the next. That happened with old trappers sometimes—they had killed more animals than they could number and, now that they were senior citizens who couldn’t eat anything but oatmeal, they suddenly started to have some kind of funny regret that mixed them up so badly they didn’t even notice people were laughing at them.

  The uncle and his nephew didn’t listen to stories and they didn’t take foolish chances. As far as they were concerned, they weren’t breaking the law so much as taking care of their families. They were interested in deer for the meat, foxes, and raccoons for their skins, but they got much more than that on the last day of December. This was the season when the sky turned black at four-thirty and the cold made breathing painful and sharp. They were inspecting the traps they had left out the day before when they heard the howling. Normally they would have backtracked, but they had worked all day with nothing to show and still had one trap left to check. As they walked forward, it wasn’t the cold that made them shiver, and their brand-new parkas from Sears couldn’t help them one bit. The nephew’s teeth were hitting against each other so hard he thought he’d chip the enamel right off them.

  It was hard to tell from the howling exactly how many wolves there were until they saw them. What sounded like a dozen turned out to be three, up above, on the ridgetop. All three were silver, brothers by the look of them. They seemed to be waiting for the uncle and his nephew, because as soon as they saw the men, the wolves stopped their racket. Yet they stayed where they were, unprotected up there on the ridge. When the uncle saw a pool of blood, he thought the wolves were after a deer or a fisher caught in the last trap, and he figured it might be best just to let them have it. The temperature had begun to drop and the sun would soon be going down. The uncle would have turned back then if his nephew hadn’t grabbed his arm.

  The last steel trap was a good one; kept oiled and cleaned, it would last another fifty years. When they heard the whimpering sound, they assumed they were simply suffering from the cold. Hallucinations occurred in severe weather; they sprang up from the ground fully formed. Jack Flannagan insisted he’d been
visited by his dead mother one day in the woods, when the temperature was ten below zero. A friend of the nephew’s would not hunt after dark, convinced that a deer he had shot one snowy day had cried real tears, just like a baby. So the wailing they heard might have been caused by twilight and ice. The notion of going home began to feel about right, even necessary. Then they saw the thing in the trap, struggling and bleeding, its foot partially crushed, and they might have shot it then, to put it out of its misery, if they hadn’t realized, all at once, that the struggling thing had the shape of a man.

  The wolves took up their howling again, while the uncle labored to open the trap. The nephew fired his gun in the air, even though he knew it was bad luck to shoot at wolves, and they took off, across the ridge and through the pine trees. It took almost two hours to get the poor creature out of the trap and carry him back to the snowmobiles. A trail of red blood burned through the snow. The drifts were now much higher, so that a mile seemed to go on endlessly. The nephew wondered aloud whether they’d be charged with murder if their unintended victim should die. He was already unconscious and his skin had turned blue. How had it been possible, the nephew asked his uncle, for him to have survived through the winter, wearing only skins on his body and wrapped around his feet? Why had they never seen him before, when they knew every man for a hundred miles around?