Linger (27 page)

• GRACE •

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Grace Brisbane. There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books. She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.

And this one loved her back. He loved her back so hard that even the things that weren't special about her became special: the way she tapped her pencil on her teeth, the off-key songs she sang in the shower, how when she kissed him he knew it meant forever.

Hers was a memory made up of snapshots: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying good-bye behind a cracked windshield.

A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam's smile.

It was a life I didn't want to leave behind.

It was a life I didn't want to forget.

I wasn't done with it yet. There was so much more to say.

• SAM •

• COLE •

I didn't know why I went with Sam to the hospital. I knew I could get recognized — though the odds seemed slim of anyone recognizing me with my stubbled face and the bags under my eyes. I also knew I could shift, if my body decided to succumb to the whims of the cold. But as Sam went to put his key into his car door to follow the ambulance, he'd looked at his bloody hand for a long second, and he'd had to try twice to get the key in the lock.

I had been hanging back, ready to disappear if it felt like the black morning cold would jerk me into a wolf, but when I saw Sam's hand, I stepped forward and took the key.

“Get in,” I said, jerking my head toward the passenger seat.

And he did.

So here I was, standing in the hospital room of a girl I barely knew with a guy I knew only slightly better, and I still wasn't quite sure why I cared. The room was full of people — two doctors, a guy who I thought was a surgeon, and an absolute army of nurses. There was a lot of hushed talking back and forth, with enough technical jargon to gag a maggot, but I got the gist
of it: They had no idea what was going on, and Grace was dying.

They wouldn't let Sam stand next to her, so he sat in a chair in the corner, his elbows on his knees and his face crumpled in one of his hands.

I didn't know what to do, either, so I stood beside him, wondering if, before I'd been bitten, I would've been able to smell all the death that hung in the air of the ICU.

A cell phone rang at my feet, a brisk, businesslike tone, and I realized it was coming from Sam's pocket. In slow motion, Sam took it out and then looked at the front of the phone.

“It's Isabel,” he said, hoarse. “I can't talk to her.”

I took it from his unresisting hands and answered it. “Isabel.”

“Cole?” Isabel asked. “Is this Cole?”

“Yeah.”

And then, the most sincere words I had ever heard out of Isabel's mouth: “Oh, no.”

I didn't say anything. But the noise behind me must have said it all.

“Are you at the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

“What are they saying?”

“What you said. They have no idea.”

Isabel swore softly, over and over again. “How bad is it, Cole? Can you tell me?”

“Sam's right here.”

“Great,” Isabel said, harshly. “That's just great.”

Suddenly, one of the nurses said, “Watch —!”

Grace half sat up, just enough to throw up more blood, all over the front of the nurse who had just spoken. The nurse matter-of-factly stepped back to scrub off her hands as another nurse took her place, with a towel for Grace.

Grace fell back onto the bed. She said something that the nurses couldn't catch.

“What, honey?”

“
Sam
,” Grace wailed, a horrible sound both animal and human, hideously reminiscent of the doe's scream. Sam jerked to his feet just as a man and a woman pushed their way into the already-crowded room.

I saw one of the nurses open her mouth to protest the intrusion as the couple headed straight for us, but she didn't have time to say anything before the man said, “You son of a bitch,” and punched Sam in the mouth.

• SAM •

Lewis Brisbane's punch took several moments to start hurting, like my body couldn't believe what had just happened to it. By the time the pain started to finally take hold, my hearing was buzzing and popping in my left ear, and I had to grab for the wall to keep from falling back over a chair. I was still sick from the sound of Grace's voice.

For a single fragment of a moment, I caught a perfectly clear image of Grace's mother watching, face blank as if waiting for an expression to land on it, doing nothing, and then Grace's dad swung at me again.

“I'll kill you,” Grace's dad said.

I just stared at his fist, my ears still hissing from the first punch. Most of my mind was still with Grace, in the hospital bed, and what little I had left to devote to Lewis Brisbane couldn't quite believe he was going to punch me again. I didn't even flinch.

Before his fist connected again, her dad staggered back, struggling to keep his footing, and as my vision and hearing came back, all in a rush, I saw Cole dragging him backward. Like he was nothing but a bag of potatoes.

“Easy, big guy,” Cole said. Then, to the nurses: “What are you staring at? Help the guy he just punched.” I shook my head a little at the nurses' offer of ice but accepted a towel for my busted forehead. As I did, I heard Cole say to Mr. Brisbane, “I'm going to let you go. Don't make me get us both thrown out of this hospital.”

I stood there, watching Grace's parents force their way to the side of the bed, and I didn't know what to do. Everything solid in my life was fracturing, and I didn't know where I belonged right now.

I saw Cole staring at me, and somehow his stare reminded me of the towel in my hand and the slow tickle of the blood as it welled from my skin. I lifted the towel to my head. Raising my arm made colorful dots spiral at the edge of my vision.

At my elbow, a nurse said, “I'm sorry — Sam? But since you're not an immediate relative, you can't stay in here. They've asked us to have you leave.”

I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn't know what I was supposed to say to her.
My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.

The nurse made a face. “I
really
am sorry.” She glanced to Grace's parents and back to me. “You did good bringing her in here.”

I closed my eyes; I could still see the swirling colors when I did. I had an idea that if I didn't sit down soon, my body was going to do it for me. “Can I tell her I'm going?”

“I don't think that's a good idea,” said one of the other nurses, darting past with something in her arms. “Let her think
he's still here. He can come back if —” she stopped herself before adding, “Tell him to stay close.”

For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

“Come on,” Cole said. He looked back over his shoulder at Mr. Brisbane, who was looking at me with a complicated expression as I left. Cole pointed at him and said, “
You're
a son of a bitch. He belongs here more than you do.”

But love isn't quantifiable on paper, so I had to leave Grace behind.

• COLE •

By the time Isabel got to the hospital, dawn was just starting to seep through the warped glass of the cafeteria windows.

Grace was dying. I'd gotten that much out of the nurses before I left. She was throwing up all her blood and they were giving her vitamin K and transfusions to slow it down, but eventually, she was going to die.

I hadn't told Sam yet, but I thought he knew.

Isabel slapped a napkin down onto the table in front of me, next to Sam's stained towel. It took me a moment to recognize the napkin as my scribbled flow chart from the diner. It said
METH
in large letters, reminding me how much I'd told Isabel. She threw herself down into the plastic chair opposite me; everything about her screamed
angry angry angry
. She wasn't wearing any makeup except for a smudged heavy line of mascara around each eye that looked like it had been there a while.

“Where's Sam?”

I gestured to the cafeteria windows. Sam was a darker blot against the still-dark sky. His arms were linked behind his head as he stared out into nothing. Everything else had moved in this room as time passed: the light across the freakishly orange walls as the sun slowly rose, the chairs back and forth as hospital staff came and left with their breakfasts, the janitor with his mop and
WET FLOOR
sign. Sam was the pillar they all pivoted around.

Isabel fired another question. “Why are you here?”

I still didn't know. I shrugged. “To help.”

“Then help,” Isabel said, and pushed the napkin closer to me. Louder, she said, “Sam.”

He lowered his hands but didn't turn around. Frankly, I was surprised he'd moved at all.

“Sam,”
she repeated, and this time, he did turn toward us. She pointed at the self-service bar and cashier at the other end of the room. “Get us some coffee.”

I didn't know what was more amazing: that Isabel had just told him to get coffee, or that he did, albeit with no expression whatsoever. I turned my gaze back to Isabel. “Wow. Just when I think I've seen you at your coldest.”

“That was me being nice,” Isabel snapped. “What good is he doing, staring outside?”

“I don't know, remembering all the great days he and his girlfriend had, before she dies.”

Isabel looked me right in the eye. “Do you think that will help you with Victor? Because it never really saves me when I think about Jack.” She pressed a finger into the napkin. “Talk to me. About this.”

“I don't understand what this has to do with Grace.”

Sam set two coffee cups down, one in front of me and one in front of Isabel. Nothing for himself.

“What's wrong with Grace is the same thing that killed that wolf that you and Grace found,” Sam said, his voice sounding gritty, like he hadn't used it in a while. “That smell is just too distinctive. It's the same thing.”

He stood by the table, as if sitting down would mean that he was agreeing to something.

I looked at Isabel. “What makes you think that I can do something these doctors can't?”

“Because you're a genius,” Isabel said.

“These people are geniuses,” I replied.

Sam said, “Because you know.”

Isabel pushed the napkin at me again. And once again, it was my father and me at the dining room table, and he was presenting me with a problem. Or I was sitting in one of his college classes when I was sixteen, and he was looking at my written work beside my solutions, searching for signs that I would follow in his footsteps. Or it was me at one of his award presentations with the ironed shirts and old school ties surrounding me, and my father telling them, in a voice that stood for no argument, that I was going to be great.

I thought of just that simple gesture from earlier, when Sam had laid his hand on Grace's collarbone.

I thought of Victor.

I took the napkin.

“I'm going to need more paper,” I said.