Forever (6 page)

• ISABEL •

For a single moment, I couldn't figure out if my father had seen Grace. His normally tidy hair was all disheveled and his eyes were full of shock or surprise or something else unguarded. He'd opened the door with such force that it banged into the wall behind it and bounced back again. The moose rattled; I waited for it to fall over. I'd never considered what an awesome sight it would be, to see all these animals start to tip like dominoes. My father was still shaking even after the moose had stopped.

I glowered at my father to cover my uneasiness. “Well, that was dramatic.” I was leaning against the door to the piano room. I hoped that Grace wouldn't break anything in there.

“Thank God,” my father said, as if I hadn't spoken. “Why the hell didn't you pick up your phone?”

I looked at him incredulously. I quite frequently let my parents' calls go through to voicemail. I called them
back
. Eventually. The fact that I'd let their calls beep through earlier today shouldn't have given them an ulcer.

Mom trailed into the room, her eyes bloodshot and her makeup a minor disaster. Considering that she normally made tears look like an accessory, I was impressed. I had thought this might be about the cop who'd stopped me, but I couldn't imagine Mom losing it over that.

I asked, suspiciously, “Why is Mom crying like that?”

My mother's voice was nearly a snarl. “Isabel, we gave you that cell phone for a reason!”

I was doubly impressed. Good for her. She normally let my father get all the good lines.

“Do you have it on your person?” my father asked.

“Jesus,” I replied. “My person has it in her purse.”

My father gave my mother a glance. “I expect you to pick it up from now on,” he said. “Unless you are in class or missing a limb, I want that phone to be picked up and held to your ear when you see that it is us. Or you can say good-bye to it. A phone is a —”

“Privilege. Yeah, I know.” I heard faint noises from inside the piano room behind me; to cover up the sound I began digging through my bag. When it had stopped, I pulled out my phone to prove that I had it. It showed twelve missed calls from my parents. And none from Cole, which, after over a month of having at least one missed call from him at all times, felt weird. I frowned. “So what's going on, anyway?”

My father said, “Travis called me and told me the police had just found a body in the woods. A girl, and they haven't identified her yet.”

This was not good. I was glad that I knew that Grace was here, in the piano room making weird scratching noises. I realized Mom was still staring at me meaningfully; I was supposed to react.

I said, “And you just assumed that some random dead person was me?”

“It was near our property line, Isabel,” Mom snapped.

Then my father said what I'd somehow known he was going to say. “She was killed by wolves.”

I was filled with incredible anger, all of a sudden, at Sam and Cole and Grace, for doing nothing when I'd told them to do
something
.

There was more noise coming from the piano room. I spoke over
the top of it. “Well, I've been at school or here all day. Hard to get killed at school.” Then, because I realized I needed to ask or look guilty: “When will they know who she is?”

“I don't know,” my father said. “They said she was in bad shape.”

Mom said abruptly, “I'm going to go change out of these clothes.” For a moment, I couldn't puzzle out the reason for her speedy exit. Then I realized she must've been thinking about my brother's death, imagining Jack torn apart by wolves. I was impervious; I knew how Jack had really died.

Just then, there was a thump from the piano room, clear enough that my father's eyes narrowed.

“I'm sorry I didn't pick up the phone,” I said loudly. “I didn't mean to upset Mom. Hey. Something hit the bottom of my car on the way home. Would you look at it?”

I waited for him to refuse me, to charge into the other room and find Grace shifting into a wolf. But instead he sighed and nodded, already heading back toward the other door.

Of course there was nothing under my car for him to find. But he spent so long investigating that I had time to hurry back to the piano room to see if Grace had destroyed the Steinway. All I found was an open window and one of the screens pushed out into the yard. I leaned out and caught a glimpse of yellow — my Santa Maria Academy shirt, snagged on one of the bushes.

There had never been a worse time for Grace to be a wolf.

• SAM •

So I had missed her again.

After the phone call, I lost hours to — nothing. Caught completely by the sound of Grace's voice, my thoughts chased each other, the same questions over and over. Wondering if I would have been able to see Grace if I'd gotten her message earlier, if I hadn't gone out to check the shed for signs of life, if I hadn't walked farther into the woods and shouted up through birch leaves to the sky, frustrated by Cole's seizure and Grace's absence and by just the weight of being me.

I drowned in the questions until the light failed. Hours gone, like I'd shifted, but I'd never left my own skin. It had been years since I'd lost time like this.

Once upon a time, that was my life. I used to look out the window for hours at a time, until my legs fell asleep beneath me. It was when I first came to Beck — I must've been eight or so, not long after my parents had left me with my scars. Ulrik sometimes picked me up under my armpits and pulled me back toward the kitchen and a life occupied by other people, but I was a silent, quivering participant. Hours, days, months gone, lost to another place that admitted neither Sam nor wolf. It was Beck who finally broke the spell.

He had offered me a tissue; it was a strange enough gift that it brought me to the present. Beck waved it at me again. “Sam. Your face.”

I touched my cheeks; they weren't so much damp as sticky with the memory of continuous tears. “I wasn't crying,” I told him.

“I know you weren't,” Beck replied.

While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell you something? There are a lot of empty boxes in your head, Sam.”

I looked at him, quizzical. Again, it was a strange enough concept to hold my attention.

“There are a lot of empty boxes in there, and you can put things in them.” Beck handed me another tissue for the other side of my face.

My trust of Beck at that point was not yet complete; I remember thinking that he was making a very bad joke that I wasn't getting. My voice sounded wary, even to me. “What kinds of things?”

“Sad things,” Beck said. “Do you have a lot of sad things in your head?”

“No,” I said.

Beck sucked in his lower lip and released it slowly. “Well, I do.”

This was shocking. I didn't ask a question, but I tilted toward him.

“And these things would make me cry,” Beck continued. “They used to make me cry all day long.”

I remembered thinking this was probably a lie. I could not imagine Beck crying. He was a rock. Even then, his fingers braced against the floor, he looked poised, sure, immutable.

“You don't believe me? Ask Ulrik. He had to deal with it,” Beck said. “And so you know what I did with those sad things? I put them in boxes. I put the sad things in the boxes in my head, and I closed them up and I put tape on them and I stacked them up in the corner and threw a blanket over them.”

“
Brain
tape?” I suggested, with a little smirk. I was eight, after all.

Beck smiled, a weird private smile that, at the time, I didn't understand. Now I knew it was relief at eliciting a joke from me, no matter how pitiful the joke was. “Yes, brain tape. And a brain blanket over the top. Now I don't have to look at those sad things anymore. I could
open those boxes sometime, I guess, if I wanted to, but mostly I just leave them sealed up.”

“How did you use the brain tape?”

“You have to imagine it. Imagine putting those sad things in the boxes and imagine taping it up with the brain tape. And imagine pushing them into the side of your brain, where you won't trip over them when you're thinking normally, and then toss a blanket over the top. Do you have sad things, Sam?”

I could see the dusty corner of my brain where the boxes sat. They were all wardrobe boxes, because those were the most interesting sort of boxes — tall enough to make houses with — and there were rolls and rolls of brain tape stacked on top. There were razors lying beside them, waiting to cut the boxes and me back open.

“Mom,” I whispered.

I wasn't looking at Beck, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow.

“What else?” he asked, barely loud enough for me to hear.

“The water,” I said. I closed my eyes. I could see it, right there, and I had to force out the next word. “My …”

My fingers were on my scars.

Beck reached out a hand toward my shoulder, hesitant. When I didn't move away, he put an arm around my back and I leaned against his chest, feeling small and eight and broken.

“Me,” I said.

Beck was silent for a long moment, hugging me. With my eyes closed, it seemed like his heartbeat through his wool sweater was the only thing in the world — and then he said, “Put everything in boxes but you, Sam.
You
we want to keep. Promise me you'll stay out here with us.”

We sat like that for a long while, and when we stood up, all my sad things were in boxes, and Beck was my father.

Now, I went outside to the wide, ancient stump in the backyard, and I lay down on it so I could see the stars above me. Then I closed my eyes and slowly put my worries into boxes, one by one, sealing them up. Cole's self-destruction in one, Tom Culpeper in another. Even Isabel's voice got a box, because I just couldn't deal with it right now.

With each box, I felt a little lighter, a little more able to breathe.

The one thing I couldn't bring myself to put away was the sadness of missing Grace. That I kept. I deserved that. I'd earned it.

And then I just lay out there on the stump.

I had work in the morning, so I should have been sleeping, but I knew what would happen: Every time I closed my eyes, my legs would ache like I'd been running and my eyelids would twitch like they should be open and I'd remember that I needed to add names to the contacts in my cell phones and I'd think that really, one day, I should fold that load of laundry that I'd run a week ago.

Also, I'd think about how I really needed to talk to Cole.

The stump was wide enough in diameter that my legs only jutted over the side a foot or so; the tree — actually two of them grown together — must have been enormous when it had stood. It had black scars on it where Paul and Ulrik had used it as a base to set off fireworks. I used to count the age rings when I was younger. It had lived longer than any of us.

Overhead, the stars were wheeling and infinite, a complicated mobile made by giants. They pulled me amongst them, into space and memories. Lying on my back reminded me of being attacked by the wolves, long ago, when I'd been someone else. One moment I was alone, my morning and my life stretched out in front of me like frames in a film, each second only slightly different from the last. A miracle of seamless, unnoticed metamorphosis. And in the next moment, there were wolves.

I sighed. Overhead, satellites and planes moved effortlessly
between the stars; a bank of clouds gestating lightning moved slowly in from the northwest. My mind flitted restlessly between the present — the ancient tree stump pressing sharply against my shoulder blades — and the past — my backpack crushed beneath me as the wolves pushed my body into a bank of snow left by the plow. My mother had armored me in a blue winter coat with white stripes on the arms and mittens too fluffy for finger movement.

In my memory, I couldn't hear myself. I only saw my mouth moving and the stick limbs of my seven-year-old self beating at the wolves' muzzles. I watched myself as if from outside my body, a blue and white coat trapped beneath a black wolf. Under its splayed paws, the garment looked insubstantial and empty, as if I had already vanished and left the trappings of my human life behind.

“Check this out, Ringo.”

My eyes flew open. It took me a moment to register Cole next to me, sitting cross-legged on the stump. He was a dark black shape against a sky made gray in comparison, holding my guitar like its frame was spiked.

He played a D major chord, badly, with lots of buzzing, and sang in his low, gritty voice,
“I fell for her in summer”
— an awkward chord change and a melodramatic tip to his words —
“my lovely summer girl.”

My ears burned as I recognized my own lyrics.

“I found your CD.” Cole stared at the guitar neck for a very long time before he put his fingers down on another chord. He'd placed every finger wrong on the fret, however, so the sound was more percussive than melodic. He let out an amiable grunt of dismay, then looked at me. “When I was going through your car.”

I just shook my head.

“From blubber she is made, my lovely blubber girl,”
Cole added, with another buzzing D chord. He said, in a congenial voice, “I think I
might have ended up a lot like you, Ringo, if I'd been fed iced lattes from my mother's tits and had werewolves reading me Victorian poetry for bedtime stories.” He caught my expression. “Oh, don't get your panties in a twist.”

“They're untwisted,” I replied. “Have you been drinking?”

“I believe,” he said, “that I've drunk everything in the house. So, no.”

“Why were you in my car?”

“Because you weren't,” Cole said. He strummed the same chord. “Gets stuck in your head, did you notice?
I'd love to spend a summer with my lovely summer girl but I'm never man enough for my ugly summer squirrel
….”

I watched a plane crawl across the sky, lights flashing. I still remembered writing that song, the summer before I met Grace for real. It was one of those that came out in a hurry, everything at once, me curled over my guitar on the end of my bed, trying to fit chords to the lyrics before the melody was gone. Singing it in the shower to lodge it firmly in my memory. Humming it while I folded laundry downstairs, because I didn't want Beck to hear me singing about a girl. All the while wanting the impossible, wanting what we all wanted: to outlast the summer.

Cole broke off his idle singing and said, “Of course, I like that one with the minor chord better, but I couldn't work it out.” He made an attempt at a different chord. The guitar buzzed at him.

“The guitar,” I said, “will only obey its master.”

“Yeah,” Cole agreed, “but Grace isn't here.” He grinned at me slyly. He strummed the same D chord. “That's the only one I can play. Look at that. Ten years of piano lessons, Ringo, and you put a guitar in my hand and I'm a drooling baby.”

Even though I'd heard him play the piano on the NARKOTIKA album, it was surprisingly difficult to imagine Cole taking piano
lessons. To learn a musical instrument, you had to have a certain tolerance for tedium and failure. An ability to sit still helped, too.

I watched lightning jump from cloud to cloud; the air was getting the heavy feeling that comes before a storm. “You're putting your fingers too close to the fret. That's why you're buzzing. Move them farther behind the fret and press harder. Just your fingertips, too, not the pad.”

I didn't think I'd described it very well, but Cole moved his fingers and played a chord perfectly, no buzzing or dead strings.

Looking dreamily up at the sky, Cole sang,
“Just a good-lookin' guy, sitting on a stump …”
He looked back to me. “You're supposed to sing the next line.”

It was a game that Paul and I had used to play, too. I considered if I was too annoyed at Cole for making fun of my music to play along. After a slightly too long pause, I added, mostly the same note, halfhearted,
“Watching all the satellites.”

“Nice touch, emo-boy,” Cole said. Thunder rumbled distantly. He played yet another D chord. He sang,
“I've got a one-way ticket to the county dump …”

I sat up on my elbows. Cole strummed for me and I sang,
“'Cause I turn into a dog each night.”

Then I said, “Are you going to play that same chord for every single line?”

“Probably. It's my best one. I'm a one-hit wonder.”

I reached for the guitar, and felt like a coward for doing it. To play this game with him felt like I was condoning the events of the night before; what he did to the house each week, what he did to himself every minute of every day. But as I took the guitar from him and strummed the strings lightly to see if it was in tune, it felt like a far more familiar language than any I would use to hold a serious conversation with Cole.

I played an F major.

“Now we're cooking with gas,” Cole said. But he didn't sing another line. Instead, now that I was sitting with the guitar, he took my place, lying down on the stump and staring at the sky. Handsome and put together, he looked as if he had been posed there by an enterprising photographer, like last night's seizure hadn't even fazed him. “Play the minor chord one.”

“Which —?”

“The good-bye one.”

I looked at the black woods and played an A minor. For a moment, there was no sound except for some sort of insect crying out from the woods.

Then Cole said, “No, sing the actual song.”

I thought of the little mocking change to his voice when he sang my summer girl lyrics and said, “No. I don't — no.”

Cole sighed, as if he'd anticipated disappointment. Overhead, thunder rumbled, seemingly in advance of the storm cloud, which was cupping around the tops of the trees like a hand hiding a secret. Picking absently at the guitar because it made me feel calmer, I gazed upward. It was fascinating how the cloud, even between lightning flashes, seemed lit from within, collecting the reflected light of all the houses and cities that it passed over. It looked artificial in the black sky: purplish gray and sharply edged. It seemed impossible that something like it would exist in nature.

“Poor bastards,” Cole said, his gaze still on the stars. “They must get pretty tired of watching us make the same damn mistakes all the time.”