Forever (15 page)

But I didn't know how to say that. So I held out my hand, and Sam took it.

• SAM •

Outside of the car, the lights were even more dazzling, as if the cold air around us moved and shimmered with violet and pink. I stretched my free hand above me as if I could brush the aurora. It was cold, but a
good
cold, the sort that made you feel alive. Over our heads, the sky was so clear that we could see every star that could see us. Now that I had kissed Grace, I couldn't stop thinking about touching her. My mind was full of the places I had yet to touch: the soft skin inside the bend of her elbow, the curve right above her hip bone, the line of her collarbone. I wanted to kiss her again, so badly, I wanted
more
of her, but instead, we held hands, our heads tipped back, and together we slowly turned, looking up into the infinity. It was like falling, or like flying.

I was torn between wanting to rush out of this moment, toward that
more
, and wanting to stay in it, living in a state of constant anticipation and constant safety. As soon as we stepped back into the house, the hunt of the wolves would become a real thing again, and I wasn't ready.

Grace, out of the blue, asked, “Sam, are you going to marry me?”

I jerked, looking over at her, but she was still gazing up into the stars as if she'd merely asked about the weather. Her eyes, however, had a sort of hard, squinty look about them that belied the nonchalant sound of her voice.

I didn't know what she expected me to say. I felt like laughing out loud. Because I realized all in a rush that of course she was right — yes, the woods would claim her for the cold months, but she wasn't dying; I hadn't lost her for good. And I had her right here, now. In comparison, everything else seemed small, manageable, secondary.

Suddenly the world seemed like a promising, friendly place. Suddenly I saw the future, and it was a place I wanted to be.

I realized that Grace was still waiting for an answer. I pulled her closer, until we were nose to nose under the northern lights. “Are you asking?” I said.

“Just clarifying,” Grace replied. But she was smiling, a tiny, genuine smile, because she had already read my thoughts. By her temple, little flyaway blond hairs drifted in the breeze; they looked like they must tickle, but she didn't twitch. “I mean, instead of living in sin.”

And then I did laugh, even though the future was a dangerous place, because I loved her, and she loved me, and the world was beautiful and awash with pink light around us.

She kissed me, very lightly. “Say okay.” She was starting to shiver.

“Okay,” I said. “It's a deal.”

It felt like a physical thing, held in my hands.

“Do you really mean it?” she asked. “Don't say it if you don't really mean it.”

My voice didn't sound as earnest as I felt. “I really mean it.”

“Okay,” Grace said, and just like that, she seemed content and solid, certain of my affections. She gave a little sigh and rearranged our hands so that our fingers were intertwined. “Now you can take me home.”

• SAM •

Back at home, Grace fell into my bed and asleep at about the same moment, and I envied her easy friendship with slumber. She lay motionless in the eerie, deathlike sleep of the exhausted. I couldn't join her; everything inside me was awake. My mind was on continuous playback, giving me the events of the day again and again, until they seemed like one long creation, impossible to pull apart into separate minutes.

So I left her upstairs and made my soft way downstairs. In the kitchen, I dug through my pocket to drop my car keys on the counter. It seemed wrong that the kitchen looked the same. Everything should've looked different after tonight. A television humming upstairs was the only indication that Cole was in residence; I was glad for the solitude. I was filled with so much happiness and sadness that I couldn't think of speaking. I could still feel the shape of Grace's face pressed into my neck and see her face when she gazed up at the stars, waiting for my answer. I wasn't ready, yet, to dilute that by speaking out loud.

Instead, I sloughed off my jacket and went to the living room — Cole had left this television on, too, though it was muted, so I switched it off and found my guitar where I'd left it leaning against the armchair. The body of it was a bit grubby from being outside; there was a new nick in the finish where either Cole or I had been too careless with it.

Sorry
, I thought, because I still didn't want to speak out loud. I picked the strings softly; the change in temperature from outside to inside had put it a little bit out of tune, but not as much as I would have thought. It was still playable, though I took the moment to make it perfect. I put the strap over my head, familiar and easy as a favorite shirt, and I remembered Grace's smile.

Then I began to play. Variations on a G major chord, the most wonderful chord known to mankind, infinitely happy. I could live inside a G major chord, with Grace, if she was willing. Everything uncomplicated and good about me could be summed up by that chord. It was the second chord Paul had ever taught me, sitting here on that ancient plaid couch. First chord: E minor. “Because,” Beck had said, passing through the room, quoting one of his favorite movies, a memory that stung a little now, “into every life, a little rain must fall.”

“Because,” corrected Paul, “into every song, we must have a minor bridge.”

Dire E minor was straightforward for a newbie like myself. It was so much harder to play the halcyon G major. But Paul made the cheerfulness seem effortless.

It was that Paul I remembered right now, not the Paul who had pinned me to the snow as a child. Just like it was the Grace that slept upstairs that I remembered now, not the wolf with her eyes that we had found in the sinkhole.

I had spent so much of life being afraid or living in the memory of being afraid.

No more.

I stepped my fingers all around the chord as I walked down the hallway, toward the bathroom. The light was already on, so I didn't have to stop playing as I stood there, looking at the bathtub at the other side of the room.

Darkness pressed on either side of my vision, memories pushing at me. I kept playing my guitar, plucking a song about the present to shove back the past. I stood there, eyes fixed on the empty tub.

Water tipped and steadied washed with blood

The weight of the guitar's shoulder strap grounded me. The pressure of the strings against my fingers held me in the here and now. Upstairs, Grace slept.

I took a step into the bathroom; my reflection in the mirror startled me as it moved. I held still to study myself. Was that my face, now?

water snaking up the fabric of my shirt

this is not sam

three two

I walked my fingers up to a C major. Filled my head with everything I could do with that chord:
She came to me in summer, my lovely summer girl
. I held on to the words Grace had said earlier.
Are you going to marry me?

Grace had done so much of the work, saving me. Now it was time to save myself.

My fingers never stilled as I walked toward the tub, my guitar singing if I wouldn't, and I stood by the bathtub, looking in. For a moment, it was just an ordinary, mundane object, just a dry basin waiting to be filled.

Then my ears began to ring.

I saw my mother's face.

I couldn't do this.

My fingers found G major and they played one thousand variations of it without me, songs they could play while my thoughts ran to other things. Songs that were a piece of something bigger than me, some unending reservoir of happiness that anyone could tap.

I hesitated, my chords echoing off the tile back at me. The walls were close around me; the doorway seemed far behind me.

I stepped into the bathtub, my shoes squeaking softly on the dry surface. My heart hammered against my T-shirt. Bees hummed inside my head. One thousand minutes other than this one lived in here: minutes with razors, minutes where everything that was me gurgled down the drain, minutes with hands pinning me in the water. But there was also Grace holding my head above the surface, Grace's voice calling me back to myself, Grace taking me by the hand.

And more important than all of those was
this
minute. The minute when I, Sam Roth, had come here under my own power, my music held in my hands, strong, finally, strong.

Rilke said:

That was how Cole found me, an hour later. Sitting cross-legged in the empty bathtub, my guitar in my lap, my fingers teasing out a G major chord, singing a song I'd never sung before.

• SAM •

• GRACE •

I was wide awake.

Everything in the room was still and black, and I was sure I had just been dreaming of exactly this moment, only with someone standing by the bed.

“Sam?” I whispered, thinking that it had been only minutes I'd been sleeping, that he'd woken me up when he came to bed.

From behind me, I heard Sam make a low-pitched sleep sound. I could feel, now, that it was not blankets pushed up against me but instead a Sam-blanket. Under normal circumstances, this small gift of his presence would have thrilled me and then lured me back to sleep, but I was so certain that someone had been standing by the bed that it was disconcerting to realize that he was firmly entrenched next to me instead. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, wary. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, Sam's paper cranes became visible, swaying and tipping, moved by an invisible wind.

I heard a sound.

It wasn't quite a crash. It was an interrupted crash, like something falling and being caught. I held my breath, listening — it was coming from somewhere downstairs — and was rewarded with another muffled thump. The living room? Something knocking something over in the backyard?

“Sam, wake up,” I said urgently. Looking over, I had a disorienting
jolt when I saw the reflections of Sam's eyes in the darkness beside me; he was already awake and was silent. Listening, like me.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered.

He nodded. I didn't so much see it as hear his head rubbing on the pillowcase behind him.

“Garage?” I suggested. He nodded again.

Another muffled scrape seemed to confirm my assessment. Sam and I tumbled out of bed in slow motion; both of us were still clothed in what we'd worn to chase the aurora borealis. Sam led the way down the stairs and then the hall, so it was me who first saw Cole emerging from the hallway to the downstairs bedrooms. His hair was crazily spiked. I had never thought, before, that he had spent any time on it at all — surely careless rock stars didn't have to work at looking like careless rock stars — but now it was clear that spiky was its natural state and he took care to keep it from being that way. He wore only sweatpants. He looked more annoyed than alarmed.

In a low voice several degrees closer to sleep than wakefulness, Cole said, “What the hell?”

The three of us stood there, a bare-footed posse, and listened for another few minutes. There was nothing. Sam rubbed a hand through his hair, leaving it comically fanned. Cole held up a finger to his lips and pointed through the kitchen toward the garage door entrance. Sure enough, if I held my breath, I could still hear scuffling coming from that direction.

Cole armed himself with the broom from beside the fridge. I opted for a knife from the wooden block on the counter. Sam gave us both bemused looks and went empty-handed.

We stood outside the door, waiting for another noise. A moment later, another crash sounded out, this one louder than before,
ding
ing off metal. Cole looked at me and raised his eyebrows, and at the same time, he opened the door and I reached in to hit the garage light.

And there was: nothing.

We looked at each other, mystified.

Into the garage, I said, “Is there anybody in here?”

Cole, sounding betrayed, said to Sam, “I can't believe there was another car here all along and you didn't tell me.”

The garage was, like most garages, filled to capacity with weird and smelly things that you didn't want to keep in the house. Most of the space was filled by a crappy red BMW station wagon, dusty with the lack of use, but there were also the requisite lawn mower, a workbench covered with small metal soldiers, and a Wyoming license plate above the door that said
BECK
89.

My eyes were drawn back to the station wagon.

I said, “Shh. Look!”

There was a weed whacker leaning askew against the hood of the car. I stepped into the garage ahead of the boys to lean it back up, and then noticed the slightly ajar hood. I pressed an experimental hand on it. “Was this like this before?”

“Yes. For the last decade,” Sam said, joining me. The BMW was not a thing of beauty, and the garage still smelled like whatever fluid it had been leaking last. He pointed to a crate of tools knocked over by the rear fender of the BMW. “That wasn't like that, though.”

“Also,” Cole said, “listen.”

I heard what Cole had heard: a sort of scuffling underneath the car.

I started down but Sam caught my arm and knelt down himself to look.

“For crying out loud,” he said. “It's a raccoon.”

“Poor thing,” I said.

“It could be a rabid baby-killer,” Cole told me primly.

“Shut up,” Sam said pleasantly, still peering under the vehicle. “I'm wondering how to get it out.”

Cole stepped past me, holding the broom like a staff. “I'm more interested in how it got in.”

He walked around the back of the car to the side door of the garage, which was slightly open. He tapped on the open door. “Sherlock found a clue.”

• SAM •

I said, “Sherlock should figure out how to get this guy out.”

“Or girl,” Cole said, and Grace regarded him approvingly. Holding the knife from the kitchen, she looked stark and sexy and like someone I didn't associate with her body. Her repartee with Cole maybe should've made me jealous, but instead it made me glad — evidence, more than anything else, that I was starting to think of Cole as a friend. Everyone harbored the secret fantasy that everyone who was friends with them would also be friends with each other.

I padded to the front of the garage, grit pressing uncomfortably into the bottom of my bare feet, and tugged the garage door open. It rolled up into the ceiling with a terrific crash and the dark driveway with my Volkswagen spread out before me. It was an eerie and lonesome landscape. The cool night air, scented with new leaves and buds, bit at my arms and toes, and some potent combination of the cool breeze and the wide, wide night quickened my blood and called to me. I was momentarily lost with the force of my wanting.

With some effort, I turned back to Cole and Grace. Cole was already poking experimentally around the bottom of the car with the broomstick, but Grace was looking out into the night with an expression that I felt mirrored mine. Something like contemplation and yearning. She caught me looking at her and her face didn't change. I felt like — I felt like she
knew
how I felt. For the first time in a very
long time, I remembered waiting in the woods for her to shift, waiting for us both to be wolves at the same time.

“Come on, you bastard,” Cole said to the animal under the car. “I was having an excellent dream.”

“Should I be on the other side with something else?” Grace asked, her eyes on me just a second longer before she turned back.

“A knife is a bit excessive,” I suggested, stepping away from the garage door. “There's a push broom over there.”

She looked at the knife before setting it down on a birdbath — another failed grounds beautification attempt by Beck.

“I hate raccoons,” observed Cole. “This is why your idea of moving the wolves is somewhat problematic, Grace.”

Grace, armed with a push broom, inserted the bristly end under the car with grim efficiency. “I hardly find this to be an apt comparison.”

I could see the masked nose of the raccoon poking out from under the BMW. In a sudden rush, it bolted away from Cole's broomstick and ran directly by the open garage door to hide behind a watering can on the other side of the car.

“Why, you dumb bastard,” Cole said wonderingly.

Grace walked over and pushed on the watering can, gently. There was a moment's hesitation, and the raccoon bolted directly back under the car. Again, completely bypassing the open door. Grace, an ardent disciple of logic, threw up her free hand. “The door is
right
there. It's the entire wall.”

Cole, looking a bit more enthusiastic than the job called for, rummaged around beneath the car with the broomstick again. Duly terrified by this onslaught, the raccoon bolted back to the watering can. The smell of its fear was strong as the rank scent of its coat, and vaguely contagious.

“This,” Cole said, the broomstick braced on the ground beside him, looking like Moses in sweatpants, “is the reason raccoons don't take over the planet.”

“This,” I said, “is the reason we keep getting shot at.”

Grace looked down at the raccoon where it was huddled in the corner. Her expression was pitying. “No complicated logic.”

“No spatial sense,” I said. “Wolves have plenty of complicated logic. Just no human logic. No spatial sense. No sense of time. No sense of boundaries. Boundary Wood is too small for us.”

“So we move the wolves someplace better,” Grace said. “Someplace with a better human-to-acre ratio. Someplace with fewer Tom Culpepers.”

“There are always Tom Culpepers,” I said at the same time that Cole said it, and Grace smiled ruefully at both of us.

“It would have to be pretty remote,” I said. “And it couldn't be private property, unless it was ours, and I don't think we're that rich. And it couldn't have existing wolves already, or there's a good chance they'd kill a lot of us in the beginning. And there would have to be prey there, or we'd just die of starvation anyway. Plus, I'm not sure how you'd catch twenty-odd wolves. Cole's been trying and he's not had much luck even getting one.”

Grace had her stubborn face on, which meant she was losing her sense of humor as well. “Better idea?”

I shrugged.

Cole scratched his bare chest with the end of the broomstick and said, “Well, you know, they've been moved before.”

He had both Grace's and my undivided attention.

Cole said, tone lazy, infinitely used to slowly doling out things other people wanted to hear, “Beck's journal starts when he's a wolf. But the journal doesn't start in Minnesota.”

“Okay,” Grace said, “I'll bite. Where?”

Cole pointed the broomstick at the license plate above the door,
BECK
89. “Then the real wolf population started to come back and, like Ringo here said, started killing the part-time wolves, and he decided their only option was to move.”

I felt an odd sense of betrayal. It wasn't that Beck had ever lied to me about where he'd come from — I was sure I'd never asked him directly if he'd always been here in Minnesota. And it wasn't like that license plate wasn't in plain sight. It was just — Wyoming. Cole, benevolent interloper that he was, knew things about Beck that I didn't. Part of me said it was because Cole had the balls to read Beck's journal. But another part of me said that I shouldn't have had to.

“So does it say how he did it?” I asked.

Cole gave me an odd look. “A little.”

“A little how?”

“Only said that Hannah helped them a lot.”

“I've never heard of Hannah,” I said. I was aware that I sounded wary.

“You wouldn't have,” Cole said. Again he had that funny expression. “Beck said that she hadn't been a wolf very long, but she couldn't seem to stay human as long as the others. She stopped shifting that year after they moved. He said she seemed more capable of holding human thoughts when she was a wolf than the others. Not much. But remembered faces and returned to places she'd been as a human, but as a wolf.”

Now I knew why he was looking at me. Grace was looking at me, too. I looked away. “Let's get this raccoon out of here.”

We stood there in silence for a few moments, a little trippy with sleep loss, until I realized that I heard movement from closer to me. I hesitated for a moment, my head cocked, listening to identify the source.

“Oh, hey,” I noted. Crouched behind a plastic garbage can, right beside me, was a second, larger raccoon, looking up at me with leery eyes. Far better at hiding than the first one, obviously, as I had been completely unaware of its presence. Grace craned her neck, trying to see over the car what I was looking at.

I didn't have anything in my hands but my hands, so that's what I used. I reached down and took the handle of the garbage can. And very slowly, I pushed it toward the wall, forcing the raccoon out the other side.

Instantly, the raccoon tore along the wall and straight out the door into the night. No pause. Just straight out the garage door.

“Two of them?” Grace asked. “Th —” She stopped as the first raccoon, inspired by the success of the escaping raccoon, bolted out after it, no detours to watering cans along the way.

“Pf,” she said. “As long as there's not a third.
Now
it figures out the concept of the door.”

I headed to the garage door to close it, but as I did, I caught a glimpse of Cole. He was staring out after the raccoons, his eyebrows pulled together in a face that, for once, wasn't arranged to best affect the viewer.

Grace started to speak and then followed my gaze to Cole. She fell quiet.

For a full minute, we were silent. In the distance, the wolves had begun to howl, and the hair on my neck was crawling.

“There's our answer,” Cole said. “That's what Hannah did. That's how we get the wolves out of the woods.” He turned to look at me. “One of us has to lead them out.”