Linger (19 page)

• ISABEL •

Every third step I ran, my breath exploded out of me all in a rush. One step to suck in another cold lungful. One step to let it escape. One step of not breathing.

I hadn't been running in way too long, and I hadn't been running this far in even longer. I'd always liked jogging because it was a place to think, far away from the house and my parents. But after Jack died, I hadn't wanted to think.

Now, that was changing.

And so I was running again, though it was far too cold to be comfortable and I was out of shape. Even with my new, buoyant running shoes, my shins were killing me.

I was running to Cole.

It was too long of a run from my house to Beck's, even when I'd been running all the time, so I parked three miles away, warmed up in the transparent mist, and started.

Three miles gave me plenty of time to change my mind. But here I was, the house in sight, and I was still running. I probably looked like hell, but what did I care? If I was just there to talk, it didn't matter what I looked like, right?

The driveway was empty; Sam was already gone. I wasn't sure if I was relieved or disappointed. It meant, at least, that there was a good chance I'd find the house entirely empty, because Cole was probably a wolf.

Again, I couldn't tell if I was relieved or disappointed.

A few hundred feet from the house, I slowed to a walk, holding the stitch in my side. I'd almost gotten my breath back by the time I got to the back door. I tried the knob, experimentally; it turned and the door fell open.

I stepped into the house and hesitated by the back door. I was about to shout hello, when I realized that it might not be just Cole who was human. So I stood there in the dark little corner by the back door looking into the brighter area of the kitchen, remembering sitting in this house and watching Jack die.

It was easy for Grace to say that it wasn't my fault. Words like that didn't mean anything at all.

A sudden thunderous noise made me jump. There was a long pause, and then another burst of crashing and slamming and commotion from somewhere in the house. It was like a voiceless argument. For a long moment, I stood there, trying to decide whether or not I should just slip back outside and run back to my car.

You already sat back and did nothing once in this house
, I thought grimly.

So I stepped deeper inside, making my way through the kitchen. I hesitated at the hall, looking into the living room, not quite understanding what was in front of me. I saw …
water
. Ragged trails of water shimmered in thin, uneven patterns across the wood floor, almost icy-looking in their perfection.

I lifted my eyes to the rest of the living room. It was completely trashed. A lamp was knocked onto the sofa, the shade askew, and picture frames littered the floor. The rug from the kitchen was thrown up against the side of one of the end tables, slicked with water on one side, and one of the chairs keeled on its back like a bystander too shocked to stand. I stepped slowly into the living room, listening for more sounds, but the house had gone quiet.

The destruction was so bizarre that it had to be intentional — books lying facedown in smears of water, pages ripped out; dented cans of food rolled against the walls; an empty wine bottle stuck upside down in a potted plant; paint shredded off the walls.

And then I heard the sounds again, scrabbling and smashing, and before I could react, a wolf came staggering down the hall to my left, ricocheting off the wall as it headed toward me. It was starting to become clear how the living room had gotten to its current state.

“Holy —” I said, and stepped backward into the kitchen. But it didn't seem like the wolf was interested in attack; water sheeted off its sides as it made its erratic way down the hall. It seemed oddly small in this context, its gray-brown fur soaked and slicked against its body, no scarier than a dog. The wolf got a few feet away and then looked up at me with insolent green eyes.

“Cole,” I breathed, my heart doing a double thump. “You crazy bastard.”

To my surprise, he flinched at the sound of my voice. It reminded me that he was, after all, only a wolf, and that his
instincts must have been screaming about my presence between him and his exit.

I backed up, but before I could decide whether I should try to get the back door open for him, Cole began to twitch. By the time he was a few feet away from me, he was full-out convulsing and twisting and retching. I took a few steps back so he wouldn't puke on my nice running shoes and crossed my arms over my chest to watch him shift.

Cole scraped some new claw marks into the wall — Sam was going to love that
so much
— as he jerked on his side. Then, his body did magic. His skin bubbled and stretched, and I saw his long wolf mouth open wide in pain. He rolled onto his back, panting.

Newly human, he lay stretched on the floor, like a whale washed up on shore, arms marked up with faint pink memories of wounds. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me.

My stomach jerked. Cole had his face back again, but his eyes were still feral, lost in his wolf thoughts. Finally, he blinked, and his eyebrows ordered themselves in a way that told me he was really seeing me.

“Cool trick, right?” he said, his voice a little thick.

“I've seen better,” I said coolly. “What are you doing?”

Cole didn't move, except to unfist his hands and stretch out his fingers. “Science experiments. On myself. Long, distinguished history of that.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Possibly,” Cole allowed, with a lazy smile. “I'm not sure if shifting metabolizes some of my blood alcohol. I don't feel too bad, though. Why are you here?”

I pressed my lips together. “I'm not. I mean, I was just going.”

Cole stretched his arm in my direction. “Don't go.”

“Because this looks like such a great time,” I said.

“Help me figure it out,” he said. “Help me figure out how to stay a wolf.”

In my mind, I was sitting again at the foot of my brother's bed, my brother who had risked everything to stay human. I was watching him lose sensation in his fingers and his toes and whimper with the pain of his brain exploding. I didn't have words to describe my disgust for Cole at that moment.

“Figure it out yourself,” I said.

“I can't,” Cole told me, still lying on his back, looking at me upside down. “I can only get myself to shift, but it doesn't stick. The cold's a trigger, but so's adrenaline, I think. I tried an ice bath, but that didn't work until I cut myself, too, for the adrenaline. But it won't stick. I keep changing back.”

“Boo hoo,” I said. “Sam's going to be pissed when he sees what you've done to his house.” I turned to go.

“Isabel, please.” Cole's voice followed me, even if his body didn't. “If I can't make myself a wolf, I'm going to kill myself.”

I stopped. Didn't turn around.

“I'm not trying to say it to manipulate you, okay? It's just the truth.” He hesitated. “I've got to get out, somehow, and it's one or the other. I just can't — I need to figure this out, Isabel. You know more about the wolves. Please just help me with this.”

I turned around. He was still lying on the floor, one hand over his chest, the other hand outstretched, reaching for me. I
said, “All you're doing is asking me to help you kill yourself. Don't pretend it's anything else. What do you think it really is if you become a wolf forever?”

Cole closed his eyes. “Then help me do that.”

I laughed. I heard how cruel my laugh sounded, but I didn't soften it. “Let me tell you something, Cole. I sat in this house, this very house” — I pointed to the floor as he opened his eyes — “in
that
room and I watched my brother die. I didn't do anything about it. You know how he died? He was bitten, and he was trying to keep from turning into a werewolf. I arranged for him to be injected with bacterial meningitis, which proceeded to give him a fever off the charts, basically set his brain on fire, destroyed his fingers and toes, and finally killed him. I didn't take him to the hospital because I knew that he would rather die than be a werewolf. And in the end, he got that wish.”

Cole stared at me. That same dead look he'd given me before. I expected him to have a reaction, but there was nothing. His eyes were dull. Empty.

“I'm only telling you this so you know that I have wanted to escape about a hundred thousand times since then. I've thought about drinking — hey, it works for my mom — or drugs — hey, it works for my mom — and I've thought about taking one of my dad's eight million guns and putting it to my head and blowing my brains out. Sad part? Not even because I miss Jack. I mean, I do, but that's not why I want to do it. It's because I feel so damn guilty about how I killed him.
I
killed him. And some days I just can't live with that. But I do. Because that's life, Cole. Life's pain. You just have to get over as much of it as you can.”

Cole said, simply, “I don't want to.”

It seemed like he always sprang honesty on me when I least expected it. I knew it was making me empathize with him, even when I didn't want to, but I couldn't help it any more than I could help kissing him before. I crossed my arms again; I felt like he was trying to pull a confession out of me. And I didn't know if I had any more to confess.

• COLE •

I was lying here, ruined, on the floor, and I had been so certain that today was the day I'd finally get up the nerve to end it.

And then it wasn't. Because somehow, watching her face when she talked about her brother, I just didn't feel the urgency anymore. I felt like I had been a balloon getting larger and larger, waiting to pop, and she had come in and burst herself first. And somehow that had let the air out of both of us.

It felt like everyone in this house had a reason to escape, and I was the only one trying to. I was so tired.

“I didn't realize you were actually human,” I said. “As in, with actual emotions.”

“Unfortunately.”

I stared at the ceiling. I wasn't sure where I went from here.

She said, “You know what
I
don't want to do anymore? Watch you lying there naked.” I rolled my eyes toward her and she added, “It's like you never wear clothes. You're always naked when I see you. Are you really stuck as a human?”

I nodded; the sound of my skull rubbing on the floor was loud inside my head.

“Good, then you won't do anything embarrassing while we're out. Get some clothes; let's go get some coffee.”

I shot her a look that clearly said,
Oh, that will help
. She smiled her thin, cruel smile and said, “If you still feel like killing yourself after caffeine, there will be plenty of time left in the day.”

“Ungh,”
I grunted as I got to my feet. I was taken aback by this perspective, standing, looking around at the hall and living room that I had trashed. I hadn't expected to be doing this again. My spine hurt like hell from shifting so many times in quick succession. “Better be some pretty amazing coffee.”

“It's not great,” Isabel admitted. She had a weird look on her face now that I was standing: relief? “But for the middle of nowhere, it's definitely better than what one would expect. Wear something comfortable. It's three miles back to my car.”

• SAM •

The studio was unimpressive from the outside. It was a squat, tired-looking rambler with a squat, tired-looking blue minivan parked in the driveway. An unmoving Labrador retriever lay in the unoccupied part of the driveway, so Grace parked on the street. She eyed the precipitous angle of the street and wrenched up the parking brake.

“Is that dog dead?” she asked. “Do you think this is really the place?”

I pointed to the bumper stickers on the minivan, all local Duluth indie bands currently in vogue: Finding the Monkey, The Wentz, Alien LifeForms. I hadn't heard any of them — they were too small to get radio play — but their names were tossed around enough in local advertisements for me to recognize them. “Yeah, I think so.”

“If we get kidnapped by weird hippies, I'm blaming you,” she said, opening her door. A rush of cold morning air got sucked into the car, smelling of city: exhaust, asphalt, the indefinable scent of a lot of people living in a lot of buildings.

“You picked the place.”

Grace blew a raspberry at me and got out. For a moment she seemed a little unsteady on her feet, but she recovered quickly, clearly not wanting me to see it.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Couldn't be okayer,” she said, popping the trunk.

When I reached down to get my guitar case, nerves punched me in the stomach, surprising me not by their presence but by the fact that they took so long to get there. I gripped the handle of my guitar case and hoped I wouldn't forget all of my chords.

We headed up to the front door. The dog didn't lift its head.

“I think it is dead,” Grace said.

“I think it's one of those things to hide keys under,” I told her.

Grace hooked her fingers in my jean pocket. I was about to knock on the front door when I saw a tiny wooden plaque with permanent-marker lettering:
STUDIO ENTRANCE AROUND BACK
.

So we went around the back of the rambler, where cracked concrete stairs too wide to easily fit our steps led us to an exposed basement and a hand-lettered sign that said
ANARCHY RECORDING, INC. ENTRANCE HERE
. Below it was a planter with some limp pansies that had been put out too early and battered by frost.

I turned to Grace. “‘Anarchy, Incorporated.' That's ironic.”

Grace gave me a withering look and rapped on the door. I wiped a suddenly clammy palm on my jeans.

The door opened, revealing another Labrador, this one very much alive, and a twenty-something girl with a red bandanna tied around her head. She was so interesting-looking and
unpretty that she actually traveled through ugly to someplace on the other side that was almost as good as pretty: huge, beaked nose, sleepy-looking dark brown eyes, and sharp cheekbones. Her black hair was pulled up in a half a dozen interconnected braids coiled on top of her head, like a Mediterranean Princess Leia.

“Sam and Grace? Come on in.” Her voice was gorgeous and complicated, a smoker's voice, though the smell pouring from inside was coffee, not cigarettes. Grace, suddenly motivated, stepped into the studio, following the scent of caffeine like a rat after the Pied Piper.

Once the door was shut behind us, it was no longer the basement of a shabby rambler but a high-tech escape pod in some other universe. We faced a wall of mixing boards and computer monitors; the entire room was dark and muted by soundproofing; recessed lighting illuminated the keypads and a chic low black sofa. One of the walls was glass and looked into a dark, soundproofed room with an upright piano and an assortment of microphones in it.

“I'm Dmitra,” the girl with the braids said, reaching a hand out to shake. She looked unflinchingly at me at the same time that I lifted my gaze from her nose to her eyes, and just like that, we had made an unspoken pact: She would not stare at my yellow eyes because I would not stare at her nose. “Are you Sam or Grace?”

I smiled at her straight-faced delivery and shook her hand. “Sam Roth. Nice to meet you.”

Dmitra shook hands with Grace, who was making friends with the Labrador, and said, “What are we doing today, kids?”

Grace looked at me. I said, “Demo, I guess.”

“You guess? What sort of instrumentation are we looking at?”

I lifted the guitar case a few inches.

“Okay,” she said. “You done this before?”

“Nope.”

“A virgin. Sometimes just what you need,” Dmitra said.

She reminded me a little of Beck. Even though she was smiling and joking, I could tell that she was watching and judging and making decisions about me and Grace as she did. Beck did that, too: gave the impression of intimacy while he was really deciding whether or not you were worth his time.

“You'll be in there, then,” she continued. “Do you want to get some coffee before we get started?”

Grace made a beeline for the kitchenette that Dmitra indicated. While she did, Dmitra asked me, “What do you listen to?”

I set my guitar case on the sofa and extracted my guitar. I tried not to sound too pretentious. “A lot of indie rock. The Shins, Elliott Smith, José González. Damien Rice. Gutter Twins. Stuff like that.”

“Elliott Smith,” Dmitra repeated, as if I hadn't said anything else. “I see.”

Grace reappeared with an ugly mug with a deer painted on it, as Dmitra did something with the computer that may or may not have been as useful as she was making it look. Finally, she directed me into the other room. She gave me an audience of microphones, one for my voice, one for my guitar, both leaning attentively toward me, and handed me a set of headphones.

“So we can talk to you,” she said, disappearing back into the other room. Grace lingered, her hand on the Labrador's head beside her.

My fingers felt grimy and inadequate to the task ahead of them; the headphones smelled like they'd been worn by too many heads. From my perch on the chair, I looked plaintively up at Grace, who looked beautiful and peaked in the strange recessed lighting, like an edgy magazine model. I realized I hadn't asked her how she was feeling that morning. If she was still sick. I remembered her losing her footing outside the car and taking care to make sure I didn't see. I swallowed, my throat clinging to itself, and asked instead, “Can we get a dog?”

“We can,” Grace said, magnanimously. “But I will not walk it in the morning. Because I will be sleeping.”

“I never sleep,” I said. “I'll do it.”

I jumped as Dmitra's voice came through the headphones. “Would you just sing and play a little bit so that I can set up the levels?”

Grace leaned over and kissed the top of my head, careful not to spill her coffee into my lap. “Good luck.”

I sort of wanted her to stay here while I sang, to remind me of why I was here, but at the same time, it wouldn't be the same to sing songs about missing her while looking at her, so I let her go.

• GRACE •

I took my place on the sofa and tried to pretend that Dmitra didn't intimidate me. She didn't make small talk while she was
rummaging on the mixing board, and I didn't know if talking would bother her, so I just sat there and watched her work.

Honestly, I was glad for the break in the conversation, the opportunity to be silent. My head was beginning its same slow thrumming, the strange heat spreading through my body again. Talking through the headache made my teeth ache; the warmth of the dull pain gathered in my throat and in my nostrils. I dabbed a tissue on my nose, but it was dry.

Just keep it together for today
, I told myself.
Today isn't about you.

I would not ruin the day for Sam. So I sat on the sofa and ignored my body the best I could and listened.

Sam had turned his back so that he faced away from us while he tuned his guitar, his shoulders hunched around the instrument.

“Sing for me for a moment,” Dmitra said, and I saw him turn his head when he heard her voice in his headphones. He launched into some rapid fingerpicking piece that I'd never heard him play before, and began to sing. His very first note wavered, a hint of nerves, and then it was gone, disappearing into his voice, breathy and earnest. The song was this heartbreaking piece about loss and saying good-bye — I thought at first that it was about Beck, or even about me, and then I realized it was about Sam:

Hearing it coming out of speakers instead of Sam made it seem entirely different, like I had never heard him before. For some reason, my face just wanted to smile and smile. It felt wrong to be so proud of something that I had absolutely nothing to do with, but I couldn't help myself. In front of the mixing board, Dmitra had gone still, her fingers poised over the top of sliders. Her head was cocked, listening, and then she said, without turning around to face me, “We might end up with something good today.”

I just kept smiling, because I'd known that all along.