Linger

But it made all the difference in the world.

My stomach aching, an echo of the pain of last night, I pressed my face into his pillow and tried not to remember those nights when I had thought he was gone for good. Imagining him over in Beck’s house now, I rolled over and got my cell phone. But I didn’t dial his number, because, stupidly, all I could think of was when we were lying together and Sam was shivering and he said, Maybe we should rethink our lifestyle. Then I thought of him telling me to stay over here, not to come over and stay with him.

Maybe he was glad to be over there, to have the excuse to be alone. Maybe he wasn’t. I didn’t know. I felt sick, sick, sick, in some new and terrible way that I couldn’t describe. I wanted to cry and felt foolish for it.

I put my phone back on the nightstand and rolled back into his pillow and finally went to sleep.

• SAM •

I was an open wound.

Restless, I roamed the halls of the house, wanting to call her again, afraid to get her in trouble, afraid of something nameless and huge. I paced until I was too tired to stand, and then I headed upstairs to my room. Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn’t underneath it.

My thoughts festered inside me. I could not sleep. My mind slid away from the reality of the empty bed beside me and curved my thoughts into lyrics, my fingers imagining the frets they would press to find the tune.

I’m an equation that only she solves / these Xs and Ys by other names called / My way of dividing is desperately flawed / as I multiply days without her.

As the endless night crawled slowly by, innumerable minutes piling one upon another without getting anywhere, the wolves began to howl and my head began to pound. One of the dull, slow aches that the meningitis had left as its legacy. I lay in the empty house and listened to the pack’s slow cries rise and fall with the pressure inside my skull.

I had risked everything, and I had nothing to show for it but my open hand, lying empty and palm up toward the ceiling.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

• GRACE •

“I’m going for a walk,” I told Mom.

No day had ever passed as slowly as this Saturday. Once upon a time, when I was younger, I would’ve been thrilled to have an entire day with my mother in the house; now, I felt restless, like I had a houseguest. She wasn’t really keeping me from doing anything, but I didn’t feel like starting anything while she was around, either.

Currently, Mom was delicately folded on the end of the couch, reading one of the books that Sam had left behind. When she heard my voice, her head whipped around and her entire body stiffened. “You’re what?”

“I’m going for a walk,” I said, tempted to take Sam’s book out of her hands. “I’m bored out of my mind and I want to talk with Sam, but you guys won’t let me and I have to do something or I will start throwing stuff around my room like an angry chimp.”

The truth was that without school or Sam, I needed to be outside. That’s what I had always done in the summers before Sam—fled to the tire swing in the backyard, book in hand, needing the sound of the woods to fill the empty, restless space inside me.

“If you go chimp, I’m not cleaning your room,” Mom warned. “And you can’t go outside. You were just in the hospital two nights ago.”

“For a fever that is now gone,” I pointed out. Just beyond her, I could see the sky, deep blue and warm-looking, and, beneath it, the somehow pregnant-looking branches of the trees reaching into the blue. Everything in me itched to be outside, smelling the oncoming spring. The living room felt gray and muted in comparison. “Plus, vitamin D is great for sick people like myself. I won’t stay out long.”

When she didn’t say anything, I found my clogs where I’d left them in the hall and slid them on. As I did, silence hung between us, speaking more strongly to what had happened that night than our few exchanged words had.

Mom looked profoundly uncomfortable. “Grace, I think we should talk. About”—she paused—“you and Sam.”

“Oh, let’s not.” My voice conveyed exactly how much enthusiasm I had for the suggestion.

“I don’t want to do it, either,” she said, closing the book without checking the page number, which reminded me again of Sam, who always checked his page number, or folded the book temporarily closed around one of his fingers, before looking up to speak. Mom continued, “But I have to talk to you about it, and if you talk to me, then I’ll tell your father you did, and you won’t have to talk to him.”

I didn’t see why I had to talk to either of them. Until now, they hadn’t cared what I did with myself or where I was when they were gone, and in a year, I’d be in college or at the very least out from under their roof. I thought about bolting but instead crossed my arms and faced her, waiting.

Mom got right to it. She asked, “Are you using protection?”

My cheeks burned. “Mom.”

But she didn’t back down. “Are you?”

“Yes. But that’s not how it is.”

Mom raised an eyebrow. “Oh, it isn’t? How is it, then?”

“I mean that’s not just how it is. It’s—” I struggled to find words to explain, to convey just why her questions and her tone made me instantly bristle. “I mean, he’s not just a boy, Mom. We’re—”

But I didn’t know how to finish the thought with her looking at me, her eyebrow already lifted in disbelief. I didn’t know how I was supposed to tell her things like love and forever, and it struck me just then that I didn’t want to. That sort of truth was something that you had to earn.

“You’re what? In love?” The way Mom said it cheapened it. “You’re seventeen, Grace. How old is he? Eighteen? How long have you known him? Months. Look—you’ve never had a boyfriend before. You’re in lust as much as anything else. Sleeping together doesn’t mean you’re in love. It means you’re in lust.”

“You sleep with Dad. Aren’t you two in love?”

Mom rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “We’re married.”

Why was I even bothering? “This entire conversation will sound pretty stupid when Sam and I are visiting you at the old folks’ home,” I said, coldly.

“Well, I sincerely hope it does,” Mom replied. And then she smiled, lightly, like the conversation was just casual chatter. Like we’d just made arrangements to go to a mother-daughter dance. “But I doubt we’ll even remember it. Sam will probably be nothing more than a prom picture. I remember what I was like at seventeen and, believe me, it was not love that was in the air. Luckily for me, I had some common sense. Otherwise you might’ve had more siblings. I remember, when I was your age—”