Forever

Grace pulled her hand away from me so she could investigate better. She peered in a dusty window, cupping her hands against the glass. A vine rested on top of her head; the rest of it crawled up the side of the lodge. She stood in ankle-deep weeds that had sprung up in the crack between the concrete pad and the foundation. She looked very tidy in comparison, clean jeans, one of my windbreakers, her blond hair spread over her shoulders. “Seems pretty nice to me,” Grace said, forever endearing her to me.

It seemed to endear her to Koenig, too. Once he realized she wasn’t being sarcastic, he said, “I suppose so. There’s no power here, though, not anymore. I guess you could get it put back on, but you’d have to have meter guys come out here then, once a month.”

Grace, her face still smushed against the glass, said, “Oh, that sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. That’s a big fireplace in there, though, isn’t it? You could make it livable without power, if you were clever.” I stood next to her and pressed my face against the window. Inside, I saw a dim great room dominated by a massive fireplace. Everything looked gray and abandoned: rugs made colorless by dust, a dead potted plant, a mounted animal head rendered unidentifiable by age. It was an abandoned hotel lobby, a snapshot of the Titanic under the ocean. A small cabin seemed more manageable all of a sudden.

“Can I go look at the rest of the land?” I asked, drawing back from the glass. I pulled Grace gently away from the climbing vine; it was poison ivy.

“Be my guest,” Koenig said. Then, after a pause, he said, “Sam?” There was a cautious note to the way he said it that made me think I wasn’t going to like what he said next.

“Yes, sir?” I asked. The sir slipped out before I even thought about it, and Grace didn’t even glance over in my direction at it, just looked at Koenig herself. It was that sort of way that he’d said, Sam?

“Geoffrey Beck is your legal adoptive father, correct?”

“Yes,” I said. My heart jerked in my chest at the question, not because my answer was a lie, but because I didn’t understand why he was asking it. Maybe he was going to change his mind about helping us. I tried to sound nonchalant. “Why do you ask?”

“I am trying to decide if I regard what he did to you as a crime,” Koenig said.

Even though we were far out of context, here in Nowhere, Minnesota, I knew what he meant. This was what he meant: me, pinned in a snowbank in front of an ordinary house, wolf breath hot on my face. Now my heart was really going. Maybe he had never intended to help us. Maybe this entire trip, every single conversation, had been to incriminate Beck. How did I know what this was about? My face felt hot; maybe it had been naive of me to think that a cop would so willingly help us.

I held Koenig’s gaze though my pulse was fast. “He couldn’t know that my parents would try to kill me.”

“Ah, but that makes it more odious, I believe,” Koenig replied, so quickly that he must’ve known how I would counter him. “If they hadn’t tried to kill you and removed themselves from the picture, what were his intentions? Kidnapping? Would he have taken you if they hadn’t made it easy?”

Grace interrupted, “You can’t charge someone for something they might have done.”

I glanced at her. I wondered if she was thinking the same things I was.

Koenig continued, “But he did have those two wolves attack Sam, with an intent to harm.”

“Not harm,” I muttered, but I looked away.

Koenig’s voice was grave. “I consider what he did to you harm. Would you walk up to someone else’s child, Grace, and bite them?”

Grace made a face.

“How about you, Sam? No? Just because most of the world doesn’t know about the weapon that Geoffrey Beck used on you doesn’t make it less of an assault.”

On the one hand, I knew he was right, but on the other was the Beck that I knew, the Beck who had made me who I was. If Grace thought I was a kind person, a generous one, it was because I had learned it from Beck. If he was a monster, surely I should have become a tiny monster in his image? All of these years, I had known the facts of my coming to the pack. The slow car, the wolves, the death of Sam Roth, son of middle-class parents in Duluth, one of whom had worked in the post office, the other of whom had worked in an office doing nothing that looked like work to a seven-year-old. As an adult looking back, the wolf attack was clearly no accident. And as an adult, I knew Beck was behind it. That he’d engineered it — “engineer” was such a purposeful word, hard to mitigate.

“Did he do anything else to you, Sam?” Koenig asked.

For one long minute, I didn’t realize what he meant. Then my head jerked up. “No!”

Koenig just looked at me, reproachful. I hated him then for taking Beck away from me, but I hated Beck more, for being so easily taken. I missed right and wrong and nothing in between.

“Stop,” I said. “Just stop. Please?”

Grace said gently, “Beck’s a wolf now. I think you’d find it very hard to prosecute him, and even if you did, I think he’s serving his sentence right now.”

“I’m sorry.” Koenig held up his hands as if I were pointing a weapon at him. “Cop-brain. You’re right. I just — never mind. It’s very hard to get it out of your mind, once you start thinking about it. Your story. The pack’s story. Do you want to go inside the lodge? I’m going inside for a moment. I want to make sure there is nothing in there that any family members might be tempted to come back for.”

“I’m going to walk first,” I said. I felt hollow with relief, that Koenig was really as he seemed. Everything about this plan felt fragile. “If that’s okay.”

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.