Forever. Part 4

"That's no way to drive," the cop said. "I'm here to give you a citation for going seventy-three in a fifty-five zone, all right? I'll be right back. Please don't move your vehicle."

He walked back to his car. I left the window open, even though bugs were starting to smack themselves against the strobe lights in my mirrors. Imagining my father's reaction to this ticket, I fell back into my seat and closed my eyes. I'd be grounded. My credit card taken away. Phone privileges gone. My parents had all sorts of torture devices they'd concocted back in California. I didn't have to worry about whether or not I should go see Sam or Cole again, because I would be locked in the house for the rest of my senior year.

"Miss?"

I opened my eyes and sat up. The trooper was by my window again, still holding my license and registration, a little ticket book beneath them.

His voice was different from before. "Your license says 'Isabel R. Culpeper.' Would that be any relation to Thomas Culpeper?" "He's my father."

The trooper tapped his pen against his ticket book.

"Ah," he said. He handed me the license and the registration. "That's what I thought. You were going too fast, miss. I don't want to see you doing that again."

I stared at the license in my hands. I looked back at him. "What about -?"

The trooper touched the brim of his hat. "Have a safe night, Miss Culpeper."

CHAPTER NINE.

* SAM *

I was a general. I sat awake for most of the night poring over maps and strategies of how to confront Cole. Using Beck's chair as my fortress, I swiveled back and forth in it, scribbling fragments of potential dialogue on Beck's old calendar and using games of solitaire for divination. If I won this game, I would tell Cole the rules by which he had to live to stay in this house. If I lost, I would say nothing and wait to see what happened. As the night grew longer, I made more complicated rules for myself: If I won but it took me longer than two minutes, I would write Cole a note and tape it to his bedroom door. If I won and put down the king of hearts first, I would call him from work and read him a list of bylaws.

In between solitaire games, I tried out sentences in my head. Somewhere, there were words that would convey my concern to Cole without sounding patronizing. Words that sounded tactful but persuasive. That somewhere was not a place I could imagine finding.

Every so often, I crept out of Beck's office and down the dim gray hallway to the living room door, and I stood and watched Cole's seizure-spent body until I was certain I had seen him take a breath. Then frustration and anger propelled me back to Beck's office for more futile planning.

My eyes burned with exhaustion, but I couldn't sleep. If Cole woke up, I might speak to him. If I'd just won a game of solitaire. I couldn't risk him waking and me not speaking to him right away. I wasn't sure why I couldn't risk it - I just knew I couldn't sleep knowing he might wake up in the interim.

When the phone rang, I started hard enough to make Beck's chair spin. I let the chair complete its rotation, then cautiously picked up the receiver.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Sam," Isabel said. Her voice was brisk and detached. "Do you have a moment to chat?"

Chat. I had a special brand of hatred for the phone as a chatting medium. It didn't allow for s.p.a.ces or silences or breaths. It was speaking or nothing, and that felt unnatural for me. I said, cautiously, "Yes."

"I didn't get a chance to tell you earlier," Isabel said. Her voice was still the sharp, enunciated words of a telephone bill collector. "My father is meeting with a congressman about getting the wolves taken off the protected list. Think helicopters and sharpshooters."

I didn't say anything. It wasn't what I thought she'd wanted to chat about. Beck's chair still had some momentum, so I let it turn another time. My tired eyes felt like they were being pickled in my skull. I wondered if Cole was awake yet. I wondered if he was still breathing. I remembered a small, stocking-hatted boy being pushed into a s...o...b..nk by wolves. I thought about how far away Grace must be by now.

"Sam. Did you hear me?"

"Helicopters," I said. "Sharpshooters. Yes."

Her voice was cool. "Grace, shot through the head from three hundred yards."

It stung, but in the way that distant, hypothetical horrors did, like disasters reported on the news. "Isabel," I said, "what do you want from me?"

"What I always want," she replied. "For you to do something."

And in that moment, I missed Grace, more than I had during any time in the past two months. I missed her so hard that it actually did make me catch my breath, like her absence was something real stuck in the back of my throat. Not because having her here would solve these problems, or because it would make Isabel let me be. But for the sharp, selfish reason that if Grace were here, she would have answered that question differently. She would know that when I asked, I didn't want an answer. She'd tell me to go sleep, and I would be able to. And then this long, terrible day would end, and when I woke up in the morning, everything would look more plausible. Morning lost its healing powers when it arrived and found you already wide-eyed and wary.

"Sam. G.o.d, am I talking to myself?" Over the line, I heard the chime cars made when a door was opened. And then a sharp intake of breath as the door shut.

I realized I was being an ingrate. "I'm sorry, Isabel. It's just been - it's been a really long day."

"Tell me about it." Her feet crunched across gravel. "Is he all right?"

I walked the phone down the hallway. I had to wait a moment to let my eyes adjust to the pools of lamplight - I was so tired that every light source had halos and ghostly trails - and waited for the requisite rise and fall of Cole's chest.

"Yes," I whispered. "He's sleeping."

"More than he deserves," Isabel said.

I realized that it was time to stop pretending to be oblivious. Probably well past time. "Isabel," I said, "what went on between you two?"

Isabel was silent.

"You aren't my business." I hesitated. "But Cole is."

"Oh, Sam, it's a little late to be pulling the authority card now."

I didn't think that she meant to be cruel, but it smarted. It was only by imagining what Grace had told me of Isabel - of her getting Grace through my disappearance, when Grace had thought I was dead - that kept me on the phone. "Just tell me. Is there something going on between you two?"

"No," Isabel snapped.

I heard the real meaning, and maybe she meant for me to. It was a no that meant not at the moment. I thought of her face when she saw the needle beside Cole and wondered just how big of a lie that no was. I said, "He's got a lot to work through. He's not good for anyone, Isabel."

She didn't answer right away. I pressed my fingers against my head, feeling the ghost of the meningitis headache. Looking at the cards on the computer screen, I could see that I had no more options. The timer said it had taken me seven minutes and twenty-one seconds to realize I'd lost.

"Neither," Isabel said, "were you."

CHAPTER TEN.

* COLE *

Back on the planet called New York, my father, Dr. George St. Clair, MD, PhD, Mensa, Inc., was a fan of the scientific process. He was a good mad scientist. He cared about the why. He cared about the how. Even when he didn't care about what it was doing to the subject, he cared about how you could state the formula to replicate the experiment.

Me, I cared about results.

I also cared, very deeply, about not being like my father in any way. In fact, most of my life decisions were based around the philosophy of not being Dr. George St. Clair.

So it was painful to have to agree with him on something so important to him, even if he'd never know about it. But when I opened my eyes, feeling like my insides had been pounded flat, the first thing I did was feel for the journal on the nightstand beside me. I had woken earlier, found myself alive on the living room floor - that was a surprise - and crawled to my bedroom to sleep or finish the process of dying. Now, my limbs felt like they'd been a.s.sembled by a factory with lousy quality control. Squinting in gray light that could've been any time of day or night, I opened the journal up with fingers that felt like inanimate objects. I had to turn past pages of Beck's handwriting to get to my own, and then I wrote the date and copied the format I'd used on the days before. My handwriting on the facing page was a bit st.u.r.dier than the letters I scratched down now.

EPINEPHRINE/PSEUDOEPHEDRINE MIX 4.

METHOD: INTRAVENOUS INJECTION.

RESULT: SUCCESSFUL.

(SIDE EFFECTS SEIZURE).

I closed the book and rested it on my chest. I'd pop the champagne over my discovery just as soon as I could stay awake. When progress stopped feeling so much like a disease.

I closed my eyes again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

* GRACE *

When I first became a wolf, I didn't know the first thing about how to survive.

When I'd first come to the pack, the things I didn't know wildly outnumbered the things that I did: how to hunt, how to find the other wolves when I got lost, where to sleep. I couldn't speak to the others. I didn't understand the riot of gestures and images that they used.

I knew this, though: If I gave into fear, I'd die.

I started by learning how to find the pack. It was by accident. Alone and hungry and feeling a hollow that food wouldn't fill regardless, I'd tipped my head back in despair and keened into the cold darkness. It was a wail more than a howl, pure and lonely. It echoed against the rocks near me.

And then, a few moments later, I heard a reply. A yipping howl that didn't last long. Then another. It took me a few moments to realize that it was waiting for me to respond. I howled again, and then, immediately, the other wolf replied. It had not finished howling when another wolf began, and another. If their howls echoed, I couldn't hear it; they were far away.

But far away was nothing. This body never got tired.

So I learned how to find the other wolves. It took me days to learn the mechanics of the pack. There was the large black wolf that was clearly in charge. His greatest weapon was his gaze: A sharp look would effectively send one of the other pack members to their belly. Anyone but the large gray wolf who was nearly as respected: He would merely flatten his ears back and lower his tail, only slightly deferential.

From them, I learned the language of dominance. Teeth over muzzle. Lips pulled back. Hair raised along spine.

And from the bottommost members of the pack, I learned about submission. The belly presented to the sky, the eyes directed downward, the lowering of one's whole body to look small.

Every day, the lowest wolf, a sickly thing with a running eye, was reminded of his place. He was snapped at, pinned to the ground, forced to eat last. I thought that being the lowest would be bad, but there was something worse: being ignored.

There was a white wolf who hovered on the edge of the pack. She was invisible. She wasn't invited into games, even by the gray-brown joker of the pack. He would even play with birds and he wouldn't play with her. She was a non-presence during hunts, untrusted, ignored. But the pack's treatment of her wasn't entirely unjustified: Like me, she didn't seem to know how to speak the language of the pack. Or perhaps I was being too kind. Really, it seemed like she didn't care to use what she knew.

She had secrets in her eyes.

The only time I saw her interact with another wolf was when she snarled at the gray wolf and he attacked her. I thought he would kill her.

But she was strong; a scuffle through ferns ensued, and in the end the joker intervened, putting his body between the fighting wolves. He liked peace. But when the gray wolf shook himself and trotted away, the gray-brown joker turned back to the white wolf and showed his teeth, reminding her that though he'd stopped the fight, he didn't want her near.

After that, I decided not to be like her. Even the omega wolf was treated better. There was no place for an outsider in this world. So I crept up to the black alpha wolf. I tried to remember everything I'd seen; instinct whispered the parts that I couldn't quite remember. Ears flattened, head turned, shrunk down smaller. I licked his chin and begged for admittance to the pack. The joker was watching the exchange; I glanced at him and cracked a wolfish grin, just fast enough for him to see. I focused my thoughts and managed to send an image: me running with the pack, joining in the play, helping with the hunt.

The welcome was so boisterous and immediate that it was as if they'd been waiting for me to approach. I knew then that the white wolf was only rejected because she chose it.

My lessons began. As spring burst out around us, unfurling blossoms so sweet they smelled of rot, turning the ground soft and damp, I became the project of the pack. The gray wolf taught me how to creep up on prey, to run around and clamp down on a deer's nose as the others swept up its flanks. The black alpha taught me to follow scent trails at the edge of our territory. The joker taught me how to bury food and mark an empty stash. They seemed to take a peculiar joy in my ignorance. Long after I'd learned the cues for play, they would prompt me with exaggerated play bows, their elbows down to the ground, tails high and waving. When, hungry to the point of distraction, I managed to catch a mouse on my own, they pranced around me and celebrated as if I'd caught a moose. When they outstripped me on hunts, they'd return with a bit of the kill, like they would for a cub; for a long time, I stayed alive because of their kindness.

When I curled on the forest floor, crying softly, my body shaking and my insides ripped to shreds by the girl that lived inside me, the wolves stood watch, protecting me, though I wasn't sure what I needed to be protected from. We were the largest things in these woods, barring the deer, and even for them we had to run for hours.

And run we did. Our territory was vast; at first it seemed endless. But no matter how far we pursued our quarry, we circled and returned to the same stretch of woods, a long sloping stretch of ground broken by pale-barked trees. Home. Do you like it?

I would howl, at night, when we slept there. Hunger that could never be filled would well up inside me as my mind s.n.a.t.c.hed at thoughts that didn't seem to fit inside my head. My howling would set off the others, and together we'd sing and warn others of our presence and cry for any members of the pack that weren't there.

I kept waiting for him.

I knew he wouldn't come, but I howled anyway, and when I did, the other wolves would pa.s.s images to me of what he'd looked like: lithe, gray, yellow-eyed. I would pa.s.s back images of my own, of a wolf by the edge of the woods, silent and cautious, watching me. The images, clear as the slender-leaved trees in front of me, made finding him seem urgent, but I didn't know how to begin to look.

And it was more than his eyes that haunted me. They were a doorway to other almost-memories, almost-images, almost-versions of myself that I couldn't catch, more elusive prey than the fastest deer. I thought I would starve for want of whatever that was.

I was learning to survive as a wolf, but I hadn't yet learned how to live as one.

CHAPTER TWELVE.