Forever. Part 28

Koenig nodded sharply, still looking apologetic. He tried the handle of the door. It opened without protest and he didn't look at us as he went inside.

Once he'd disappeared inside, I headed around the back of the lodge, Grace following after she'd plucked a tick from the leg of her jeans and crushed it with her fingernail. I had no fixed thought of where I wanted to go, just away, just farther into the wild, just more; I suppose I had an idea I wanted to see the lake. A wooden plank path led us one hundred feet away from the lodge and back into the trees before giving way to ferns and thorns. I listened to the birds and the sounds of our feet through the underbrush. The afternoon sun was painting everything shades of gold and green. I felt very quiet and small and still inside.

Grace said, "Sam, this could work."

I didn't look at her. I was thinking about the miles of road between us and home. Beck's house already felt like a wistful memory. "That lodge is scary."

"It could be cleaned up," Grace said. "It could work."

"I know," I said. "I know it could."

There was a ma.s.sive outcropping before us, the slender rocks longer than the Volkswagen, flat as s.h.i.+ngles. Grace only paused for a moment before climbing up the side. I scrambled up after her and together we stood, higher than we had been before, but still not high enough to see the tops of the tallest trees. There was only the humming feeling one gets up high, that feeling that the ground was moving slightly, to say that we were any closer to the sky than we were on the ground. I had never seen pines this tall in Mercy Falls. One pine slanted close to the top of the outcropping and Grace dragged her fingers along its trunk, her face wondering. "It's so beautiful." She had to pause, her hand rested on the bark, to tip her head all the way back to see the top. There was something lovely in the way her mouth looked, lips parted with amazement, something lovely about just the line of her back and legs altogether, at home on top of this ma.s.sive pile of rock in the middle of nowhere.

I said, "You make it easy to love you."

Grace dropped her fingers from the tree and turned to me. She turned her head sideways as if I'd told a riddle and she had to work to puzzle it out. "Why do you look so sad?"

I put my hands in my pockets and looked at the ground beyond the rock. There were a dozen different shades of green down there, if you were really looking. As a wolf, there wouldn't be a single one. "This is the place. But it's going to have to be me, Grace. That's what Cole wants. We can't trap all of the wolves and we don't have enough people to drive them out. The only chance we have is to lead them out, and it has to be a wolf with some sense of human direction. I wanted Cole to do it. I thought about this: If everything were fair and logical, it would be him. He likes being a wolf; it's his science, his toys. If the world were a fair place, he would be the one to lead them out. But no. He told me he couldn't hold anything in his head when he was a wolf. He said he wanted to, but he couldn't."

I heard Grace breathing, slow and cautious, but she didn't say anything.

"You don't even s.h.i.+ft anymore," Grace said.

I knew the answer to that. With utmost certainty. "Cole could make it happen."

Grace pulled one of my hands out of a pocket and rested my curled fingers in her palm. I felt her pulse, light and steady, against my thumb.

"I was beginning to take these for granted," I said, moving my fingers against her skin. "I was beginning to think I'd never have to do it again. I was beginning to like the person I was." I wanted to tell her how badly I didn't want to s.h.i.+ft again, how badly I didn't even want to think about s.h.i.+fting. How I was starting to finally think of myself in present tense, life in motion instead of life, preserved. But I didn't trust my voice to take me there. And admitting it out loud wouldn't make what had to be done any easier. So again I was silent.

"Oh, Sam," she said. She put her arms around my neck and let me rest my face against her skin. Her fingers moved through my hair. I heard her swallow. "When we -"

But she didn't finish. She just squeezed my neck hard enough that my breath had to ease by her body to escape. I kissed her collarbone, her hair tickling my face. She sighed.

Why did everything feel like saying good-bye?

The forest was noisy around us: birds singing, water splas.h.i.+ng, wind whispering sh-sh-sh through the leaves; this was the sound of its breathing before we arrived and would keep being such after we left. The cloth of this natural world was made of private, unspoken sorrows, and ours was just another st.i.tch on the hem.

"Sam." Koenig stood at the base of the outcropping. Grace and I stepped back from each other. I had one of Grace's hairs in my mouth. I removed it. "Your phone rang and dropped the call before they could leave a message. There's not enough reception out here for anyone to get through, really. It was your home number."

Cole.

"We should get back," Grace said, already climbing down with the same aplomb that she'd made the ascent. She stood beside Koenig and together they surveyed the rock and the surrounding forest until I joined them.

Koenig made the smallest of head gestures to the forest around us. "What do you think?"

I looked at Grace, so Koenig did, too. She just nodded.

"You, too?" Koenig asked me.

I smiled ruefully.

"That's what I thought," he said. "This is a good place to be lost."

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO.

* COLE *

In one hour, I called Sam's cell phone as many times as I'd called Isabel's cell phone in two months. To the same effect. Nothing. I could take it personally, but I liked to think that I'd learned my lesson. Patience. It was a virtue.

It had never been one of my strong points.

I called Sam. The phone rang and rang until my ears were tricked into believing that every other ring was longer.

The minutes stretched out indefinitely. I put on music, and even the songs moved in slow motion. I was irritated every time a refrain came around; it felt like I'd already listened to it one hundred times before.

I called Sam.

Nothing.

I trotted down the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs, up to the kitchen. I'd cleaned my stuff up, mostly, but in the spirit of benevolence and distracting myself, I used a wet paper towel to wipe the kitchen counter and make a small pyramid of escaped coffee grounds and toaster crumbs.

I called Sam. More ringing. I jogged back down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, then to my stash of things in my bedroom. I rummaged through all the supplies I'd gathered over the past several months, not really needing anything, just wanting to be busy, to move my hands. My feet ran whether or not I was standing up, so I might as well stand.

I called Sam.

Ring, ring, ring, ring. Ring, ring. Ring, ring.

I got a pair of sweatpants and a T-s.h.i.+rt and took them down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. I laid them on the chair. Wondered if I should get a long-sleeved s.h.i.+rt or a sweater. No. A T-s.h.i.+rt was fine. No. Maybe a sweater. I got a Berkeley sweats.h.i.+rt out of a drawer.

I called Sam.

Nothing. Nothing. Where in h.e.l.l was he?

I jotted in Beck's notebook that was now mine. I went back down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. I checked the thermostat. I turned it as hot as it would go. I got s.p.a.ce heaters from the garage. I found wall sockets in the bas.e.m.e.nt and plugged them in. It was a barbecue down there. Not hot enough. I needed it to be summer inside these walls.

I called Sam.

Two rings. Three.

"Cole, what is it?" It was Sam. His voice was staticky, indistinct, but it was him.

"Sam," I said. I sounded a little peevish at this point, but I felt I deserved it. I looked down at the wolf body on the floor in front of me. The sedatives were starting to wear off. "I've caught Beck."

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE.

* SAM *

I hadn't realized until Cole caught Beck that it was Chinese Day.

For the longest time, I'd thought Chinese Day was a real holiday. Every year on the same day in May, Ulrik or Paul and whoever else was there would take me and Shelby and head out for a day of festivities - balloon in my hand, museums visited, fancy cars we didn't intend to buy taken for test drives - that concluded with an epic meal at Fortune Garden in Duluth. I didn't eat much but the spring rolls and fortune cookies, but the a.s.sociation with the day of revelry made it my favorite restaurant regardless. We always ended up with a dozen white takeaway boxes that populated the refrigerator for weeks. Long after dark, we'd pull into the driveway and I'd have to be dragged and prodded up the stairs to bed.

Beck never came with us. Paul gave a different excuse every year. He has work and needs us out of the house or He was up late or He doesn't celebrate Chinese Day. I didn't think about it, really. There were plenty of other things going on that day to hold my attention. The truth was I was young and self-involved and, in the way of youth, I didn't think about what my guardians did when I wasn't with them. It was easy for me to imagine Beck working hard in his home office on that day, if I imagined anything at all.

So for years, Chinese Day came and went. Up at the crack of dawn and out of the house. As I got older, I began to see more details that I'd missed when I was younger. As we left, Ulrik or Paul would always take the phone off the hook, and they'd lock the front door behind us, as if no one were home.

By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I no longer fell asleep the moment we got home. Usually I would feign sleepiness so that I could retreat to my room with whatever new book or possession I'd acquired on that particular Chinese Day. I would creep out of my room only to pee before I finally turned out my light. One year, though, as I left my room, I heard - something. I still don't remember what it was about the sound that made me pause in the hall. Something about it was out of place, unfamiliar.

So for the first time, I silently padded past the bathroom toward where Beck's bedroom door was cracked open. I hesitated, listening, glancing behind me to make certain I wasn't being watched. And then I took another soundless step forward so that I could see into Beck's room.

The small lamp on his bedside table weakly illuminated his room. There was a plate in the middle of the floor with an untouched sandwich and browning slices of apple on it, and a full coffee mug beside it, an ugly ring around the edge where the milk had separated. A few feet away from that, sitting on the floor at the end of the bed, facing away from me, was Beck. There was something shocking to me about his posture, something that later I could never forget. His knees were drawn up to his chest like a boy's and his hands were laced behind his head, pulling it down toward his body as if he were protecting it from an oncoming blast.

I didn't understand. And then I heard the soft sound again, and saw his shoulders shake. No, not his shoulders, but his entire body, a tremble more than a shake, the intermittent, silent sobs of someone who has been at it for a while and is saving his strength for the long haul still to come.

I remember feeling nothing but absolute surprise that Beck should have had something like this living inside him and that I had never known, never even guessed. Later I'd learn it was not the only secret Beck had, just maybe the best-kept one.

I left Beck up there, him and his private grief, and I went downstairs to find Ulrik, flipping listlessly through television stations in the living room.

I said simply, "What's wrong with him?"

That was how I learned about Beck's wife, and how she had died on this day in May, nine years earlier. Right before I was bitten. I hadn't made the connection, or if I had, it wasn't in any important way, not in any way that mattered.

Now, it mattered.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR.

* SAM *

As we pulled into the driveway, my cell phone rang again. Koenig didn't even put the truck into park. He put his foot on the brake pedal. He looked at his watch and then in his rearview mirror as we climbed out.

"Are you coming in?" Grace asked him, leaning in. It hadn't occurred to me that he might want to.

"No," Koenig said. "I'm pretty sure that whatever is going on in there is - I would just prefer to have plausible deniability. I never saw you today. You are talking to your parents later, correct?"

Grace nodded. "I am. Thanks. For everything."

"Yes," I said. It wasn't really enough. The phone was still ringing. It was still Cole. I needed to say more to Koenig, but - Beck. Beck was in there.

"Call me later, when you decide," Koenig said. "And, Sam, pick up your phone."

Grace shut the door and patted the side of the truck, twice, sending Koenig off.

"I'm here," I said, into the phone.

"Took you long enough," Cole said. "Did you walk back?"

"What?" I asked. The afternoon light was coming in strong and low through the pine trees; I had to blink and look the other way. I thought I hadn't understood him right. "I'm in the driveway now."

Cole paused before saying, "Good thing, too. Hurry the h.e.l.l up. And if you get bitten, remember, this was your idea."

I asked Cole, "Do I even want to know?"

"I may have misjudged doggie tranquilizer dosages. Not everything you read online is true. Apparently wolves require more than neurotic German shepherds."

"Jesus," I said. "So Beck is loose in the house? Just wandering around?"

Cole's voice sounded a little terse. "I'd like to point out that I did the impossible part for you already. I got him out of the woods. You can get him out of your bedroom."

We hurried to the front door. In this light, the windows of the house were mirrors full of the sun. Once upon a time, this would be dinnertime. I'd be walking into a house full of microwaved leftovers, pending algebra homework, Iron b.u.t.terfly pounding out of the speakers, and Ulrik playing air drums. Beck would say: "Someone once said European men had great taste. That someone got it really wrong." The house would feel filled to capacity; I'd retreat to my room for some peace.

I missed that sort of noise.

Beck. Beck was here.