Forever

I guess I was turning out a lot like my mother.

“Dad and I have been talking about moving back to California,” Mom said. “When this is all over.”

I narrowly avoided wrecking the car. “And you were going to tell me … when?”

“When it became more definite. I have a few leads on jobs out there; it’s just a question of their hours and how much we can sell the house for.”

“Again,” I said, a little breathless, “you were going to tell me when?”

My mother sounded perplexed. “Well, Isabel, you’re about to go off to college, and all but two on your list are there. It will make it easier for you to visit. I thought you hated it here.”

“I did. I do. I just — I can’t believe you didn’t tell me it was an option, before —” I wasn’t sure how to end the sentence, so I just stopped.

“Before what?”

I threw one of my hands up in the air. I would have thrown both, but I had to keep one on the wheel. “Nothing. California. Great. Yahoo.” I thought about it — stuffing my giant coats in boxes, having a social life, living someplace where not everyone knew the sordid history of my dead brother. Trading Grace and Sam and Cole for a life of cell phone plans, seventy-three-degree days, and textbooks. Yes, college in California had always been the plan, in the future. Apparently, however, the future was getting here faster than I’d expected.

“I can’t believe that man mistook a coyote for a wolf,” my mother mused as I pulled into our driveway. I remembered when we’d first moved here. I’d thought the house looked like something out of a horror movie. Now, I saw that I’d left my light on in my third-floor bedroom and it looked like something out of a children’s book, a big sprawling Tudor with one yellow window on the top floor. “They look nothing alike.”

“Well,” I said, “some people see what they want to see.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

GRACE

I found Sam leaning on the front porch railing, a long, dark form barely visible in the night. It was funny how Sam, with just the curve of his shoulders and the way he ducked his chin, could convey so much emotion. Even for someone like me, someone who thought a smile was a smile was a smile, it was easy to see the frustration and sadness in the line of his back, the bend of his left knee, the way one of his slender feet was rolled on its side.

I felt suddenly shy, as uncertain and excited as I had been the first time I met him.

Without turning on the front light, I joined him at the railing, not sure of what to say. I felt like I wanted to jump up and down and grab him around the neck and punch his chest and grin like a crazy person or cry. I wasn’t sure what the protocol for this was.

Sam turned to me, and in the dim light from the window, I saw that there was stubble on his chin. While I was gone, he had gotten older. I reached up and scrubbed his stubble with my hand, and he smiled ruefully.

“Does that hurt?” I asked. I rubbed his stubble against the grain. I’d missed touching him.

“Why would it?”

“Because it’s going the wrong way?” I suggested. I was overwhelmingly happy to be standing here, my hand on his unshaven cheek. Everything was terrible, but everything was fine, too. I wanted to be smiling, and I thought my eyes probably already were, because he was sort of smiling, too, a puzzled one, like he wasn’t certain if that was what he meant to do.

“Also,” I said, “hi.”

Sam did smile then, and said softly, “Hey, angel.” He put his lanky arms around my neck in a fierce hug, and I wrapped mine around his chest to squeeze him as hard as I could. I loved to kiss Sam, but no kiss could ever be as wonderful as this. Just his breath against my hair and my ear smashed up against his T-shirt. It felt like together, we were a sturdier creature, Grace-and-Sam.

Still locking me in his arms, Sam asked, “Did you eat something yet?”

“A bread sandwich. I also found some clogs. Not to eat.”

Sam laughed softly. I was so glad to hear it, so hungry to hear him. He said, “We aren’t very good at shopping.”

Into his shirt — he smelled like fabric softener — I mumbled, “I don’t like grocery shopping. It’s the same thing over and over every week. I’d like to make enough money, one day, that someone else would do it for me. Do you have to be rich for that? I don’t want a fancy house. Just someone else to do the shopping.”

Sam considered. He hadn’t loosened his hold on me yet. “I think you always have to do your own shopping.”

“I’ll bet the Queen doesn’t shop for herself.”

He blew a breath out over the top of my hair. “But she always eats the same thing every day. Eel jellies and haddock sandwiches and scones with Marmite.”

“I don’t think you even know what Marmite is,” I said.

“It’s something you put on bread and it’s disgusting. That’s what Beck told me.” Sam pulled his arms free and leaned on the railing instead. He eyed me. “Are you cold?”

It took me a moment to realize the implication: Will you shift?

But I felt good, real, firmly me. I shook my head and joined him at the railing. For a moment we just stood there in the darkness and looked out into the night. When I glanced over at Sam, I saw that his hands were knotted together. The fingers of his right hand squeezed his left thumb so tightly that it was white and bloodless.

I leaned my head against his shoulder, just his T-shirt between my cheek and his skin. At my touch, Sam sighed — not an unhappy sigh — and said, “I think those are the northern lights.”

I shifted my gaze without lifting my head. “Where?”

“Over there. Above the trees. See? Where it’s sort of pink.”

I squinted. There were a million stars. “Or it could be the lights from the gas station. You know, that QuikMart outside of town.”

“That’s a depressing and practical thought,” Sam said. “I’d rather it was something magical.”

“The aurora borealis isn’t any more magical than the QuikMart,” I pointed out. I had done a paper on it once, so I was more aware of its science than I might have otherwise been. Though I had to admit that I did find the idea of solar wind and atoms playing together to create a light show for us a little magical anyway.

“That’s also a depressing and practical thought.”

I lifted my head and shifted to look at him instead. “They’re still beautiful.”