Forever

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 massive outcropping before us, the slender rocks longer than the Volkswagen, flat as shingles. 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 massive 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 shift 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 shift again, how badly I didn’t even want to think about shifting. 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 splashing, 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 stitch 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 basement 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 basement, 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-shirt and took them down to the basement. I laid them on the chair. Wondered if I should get a long-sleeved shirt or a sweater. No. A T-shirt was fine. No. Maybe a sweater. I got a Berkeley sweatshirt out of a drawer.

I called Sam.

Nothing. Nothing. Where in hell was he?

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