Forever

“You — you’re from …” my mother started. She squinted at him. I waited for her to say NARKOTIKA, though I’d never imagined her a fan. But she said, “The boy from the stairs. From the house. The na**d one. Isabel, when I said I didn’t want you to do this in the house, I didn’t mean to take it to the clinic. Why are you under this counter? Oh, I don’t want to know. I just don’t.”

I didn’t really have anything to say.

My mother rubbed one of her eyebrows with a hand that was holding a closely printed form. “God, where is your car?” “Across the road,” I said.

“Of course it is.” She shook her head. “I am not telling your father I saw you here, Isabel. Just, please, do not …” She didn’t define what I was supposed to avoid doing. Instead, she threw my half-drunk bottle of juice in the trash can by the door, and turned the light out again. Her shoes receded down the hallway and then there was the popping of the outside door opening and closing. The clunk of the dead bolt.

In the darkness, Cole was invisible, but I could still feel him beside me. Sometimes you didn’t have to see something to know it was there.

I felt a tickle on my skin; it took me a moment to realize that Cole was driving his die-cast Mustang up my arm. He was laughing to himself, hushed and infectious, as if there was still any reason to be quiet. He turned the car around at my shoulder and headed back down toward my hand, the wheels skidding on my skin a bit when he laughed.

I thought it was the truest thing I’d ever heard from Cole St. Clair.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

SAM

I didn’t realize how accustomed I’d become to a lack of routine until we had one. Somehow, with Grace back in the house and Cole’s scientific exploration more focused, our lives took on a sheen of normalcy. I became diurnal again. The kitchen once more became a place for eating; on the counter, prescription drug bottles and scribbled notes were slowly exchanged for cereal boxes and coffee mugs with rings in the bottom. Grace shifted only once in three days, and even then just for a few hours, returning shakily to bed after shutting herself in the bathroom for the duration. The days felt shorter, somehow, when night and sleeping came on a schedule. I went to work and sold books to whispering customers and came home with the feeling of a condemned man given a few days’ reprieve. Cole spent his days trying to trap wolves and fell asleep in a different bedroom each night. In the mornings, I caught Grace putting out pans of stale granola for the pair of raccoons, and in the evenings, I caught her wistfully looking at college websites and chatting with Rachel. We were all hunting for something elusive and impossible.

The wolf hunt was on the news most nights.

But I was — not quite happy. Pending happy. I knew this was not really my life; it was a borrowed life. One that I was temporarily wearing until I could sort out my own. The date of the wolf hunt felt far away and implausible, but it was impossible to forget. Just because I couldn’t think of what to do didn’t mean that something didn’t need to be done.

On Wednesday, I called Koenig and asked him if he could give me directions to the peninsula so I could properly investigate its potential. That’s what I said — “properly investigate.” Koenig always seemed to have that effect on me.

“I think,” Koenig said, with an emphasis on think that indicated he really meant know, “that it would be better if I took you out there. Wouldn’t want you getting the wrong peninsula. I can do Saturday.”

I didn’t realize that he had made a joke until we’d hung up, and then I felt bad for not laughing.

On Thursday, the newspaper called. What did I have to say about the Grace Brisbane missing persons case?

Nothing, that was what I had to say. Actually, what I had said to my guitar the night before was

you can’t lose a girl you misplaced years before

stop looking

But the song wasn’t ready for public consumption, so I just hung up the phone without saying anything else.

On Friday, Grace told me that she was coming with Koenig and me to the peninsula. “I want Koenig to see me,” she said. She was sitting on my bed matching socks while I tried out different ways of folding towels. “If he knows I’m alive, there can’t be a missing persons case.”

Uncertainty made an indigestible lump in my stomach. The possibilities sown by that action seemed to grow rapid and fierce. “He’ll say you have to go back to your parents.”

“Then we’ll go see them,” Grace said. She threw a sock with a hole in it to the end of the bed. “Peninsula first, then them.”

“Grace?” I said, but I wasn’t sure what I was asking her.

“They’re never home,” she said recklessly. “If they’re home, me talking to them was meant to be. Sam, don’t give me that look. I’m tired of this … not knowing. I can’t relax, waiting for the ax to fall. I’m not going to have people suspecting you of — of — whatever it is they think you did. Kidnapped me. Killed me. Whatever. I can’t fix very much these days, but I can fix that. I can’t take the idea of them thinking of you that way.”

“But your parents …”

Grace made a massive ball of socks without mates between her hands. I wondered if I’d unknowingly been wandering about all this time in socks that didn’t quite match. “They only have a couple of months until I’m eighteen, Sam, and then they can’t say anything about what I do. They can choose the hard way and lose me forever as soon as my birthday rolls around, or they can be reasonable and we can one day be on speaking terms with them again. Maybe. Is it true that Dad punched you? Cole says he punched you.”

She read the response in my face.

“Yeah,” she said, and she sighed, the first evidence that this topic held any pain for her. “And that is why I’m not going to have a problem having this conversation with them.”

“I hate confrontation,” I muttered. It was possibly the most unnecessary thing I had ever said.

“I don’t understand,” Grace said, stretching out her legs, “how a guy who never seems to wear any socks has so many ones that don’t match.”

We both looked at my bare feet. She reached out her hand as if she could possibly reach my toes from where she sat. I grabbed her hand and kissed her palm instead. Her hand smelled like butter and flour and home.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it your way. Koenig, then your parents.”