Linger

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

• GRACE •

I didn’t even see Dad come into the room. The first moment I realized he was there was when I heard his voice, far away, like sound through water.

“What’s going on here?”

Sam’s voice was a murmured soundtrack to the pain that burned through me. I hugged my pillow and stared at the wall. I could see the diffuse shadow that Sam made and the sharper one of my father, closer to the hall lights. I watched them move back and forth, making one big shape and then two again.

“Grace. Grace Brisbane.” My father’s voice became louder again. “Don’t pretend I’m not here.”

“Mr. Brisbane—” Sam started.

“Do not—do not—‘Mr. Brisbane’ me,” Dad snapped. “I can’t believe you can look me in the face, when behind our backs—”

I didn’t want to move because every movement made the fire inside me burn faster, but I couldn’t let him say that. I rolled toward them, wincing at the thorns of pain that prickled through my stomach as I did. “Dad. No. Don’t say that to Sam. You don’t know.”

“Don’t think I’m not furious with you, too!” Dad said. “You have completely, utterly betrayed our trust in you.”

“Please,” Sam said, and now I saw that he was standing by the side of the bed in his sweatpants and T-shirt, fingers making white marks in his own arms. “I know you’re angry with me, and you can keep being angry with me and I don’t blame you, but there’s something wrong with Grace.”

“What’s going on here?” Now Mom’s voice. Then, in a strange, disappointed tone that I knew would kill Sam, “Sam? I can’t believe it.”

“Please, Mrs. Brisbane,” Sam said, although Mom had told him before to call her Amy, and he normally did, “Grace is really, really warm. She—”

“Just get away from the bed. Where’s your car?” Dad’s voice fell into the background again, and I stared at the shape of the ceiling fan above me, imagining it coming on and drying the sweat on my forehead.

Mom’s face appeared in front of me, and I felt her lay her hand on my forehead. “Sweetie, you do seem feverish. We heard you cry out.”

“My stomach,” I murmured, careful not to open my mouth too wide, in case what was inside me crawled out.

“I’m going to try to find the thermometer.” She vanished from my sight. I heard Dad’s and Sam’s voices going on and on and on. I didn’t know what they could possibly have to talk about. Mom reappeared. “Try to sit up, Grace.”

I cried out as I did, claws scraping the inside of my skin. Mom handed me a glass of water while she peered at the thermometer.

Sam, standing by the bedroom door, jerked around when the glass slid from my unprotesting hand and landed on the floor with a dull and distant sound. Mom stared at the glass, and then at me.

My fingers still in a circle, cupping an invisible glass, I whispered, “Mom, I think I’m really sick.”

“That’s it,” Dad said. “Sam, get your coat. I’m taking you to your car. Amy, take her temperature. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’ll have my phone.”

I turned my eyes toward Sam, and his expression pierced me. He said, “Please don’t ask me to leave her like this.” My breath came a little faster.

“I’m not asking,” my father said. “I’m telling. If you ever want to be allowed to see my daughter again, you will get out of my house right now, because I am telling you to.”

Sam scrubbed his hands through his hair and then linked them behind his head, eyes closed. For a moment, it was like we all held our breaths, waiting to see what he would do. The tension in his body was written so clearly that an explosion seemed imminent.

He opened his eyes, and when he spoke, I almost didn’t recognize his voice. “Don’t—don’t even say that. Don’t threaten me with that. I’ll go. But don’t—” And he couldn’t even say anything else. I saw him swallow, and I think I said his name, but he was already down the hall with my father following him.

A moment later, I thought I heard the engine of Dad’s car rev to life outside, but it was Mom’s car, and I was in it, and I felt like my fever was eating me alive. Outside the car window, the stars swam in the cold night sky above me as we drove, and I felt small and alone and in pain. Sam Sam Sam Sam where are you?

“Sweetie,” Mom said from the driver’s seat. “Sam’s not here.”

I swallowed tears and watched the stars wheel out of sight.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

• SAM •

The night that Grace went to the hospital without me was the night I finally turned my eyes back to the wolves.

It was a night full of tiny coincidences that collided into something bigger. If Grace hadn’t gotten sick that night, if her parents had been out late as they usually were, if they hadn’t discovered us, if I hadn’t gone back to Beck’s house, if Isabel hadn’t heard Cole outside her back door, if she hadn’t delivered Cole to me, if Cole hadn’t been equal parts junkie and ass**le and genius—how would life have unfolded?

Rilke says: “Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben”—“We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.”

My hand already missed the weight of Grace’s.

Nothing was the same after that night. Nothing.

After I got into the car with Grace’s father, he drove me to the cluttered alley behind the bookstore where my Volkswagen was parked, navigating carefully so that he didn’t rub his mirrors on the trash bins on either side. He pulled to a stop just behind my car, his silent face illuminated by the flickering streetlight that hung from the second story of the store. I was silent, too, my mouth sealed shut with a toxic paste of guilt and anger. We sat there together, and the windshield wiper scraped suddenly across the windshield, making us both flinch. He had accidentally turned it to intermittent when he signaled to enter the alley. He let it swipe the already-clear windshield once more before he seemed to remember to turn it off.

Finally, without looking at me, he said, “Grace has always been perfect. In seventeen years, she has never gotten into trouble at school. She’s never done drugs or alcohol. She’s a straight-A student. She has always been absolutely perfect.”

I didn’t say anything.

He went on. “Until now. We don’t need someone to come along and corrupt her. I don’t know you, Samuel, but I do know my daughter. And I know that this is all you. I am not trying to be threatening here, but I won’t have you ruining my daughter. I think you seriously need to reconsider your priorities before you see her again.”