Forever

My ears burned as I recognized my own lyrics.



“I found your CD.” Cole stared at the guitar neck for a very long time before he put his fingers down on another chord. He’d placed every finger wrong on the fret, however, so the sound was more percussive than melodic. He let out an amiable grunt of dismay, then looked at me. “When I was going through your car.”



I just shook my head.



“From blubber she is made, my lovely blubber girl,” Cole added, with another buzzing D chord. He said, in a congenial voice, “I think I might have ended up a lot like you, Ringo, if I’d been fed iced lattes from my mother’s tits and had werewolves reading me Victorian poetry for bedtime stories.” He caught my expression. “Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist.”



“They’re untwisted,” I replied. “Have you been drinking?”



“I believe,” he said, “that I’ve drunk everything in the house. So, no.”



“Why were you in my car?”



“Because you weren’t,” Cole said. He strummed the same chord. “Gets stuck in your head, did you notice? I’d love to spend a summer with my lovely summer girl but I’m never man enough for my ugly summer squirrel. …”



I watched a plane crawl across the sky, lights flashing. I still remembered writing that song, the summer before I met Grace for real. It was one of those that came out in a hurry, everything at once, me curled over my guitar on the end of my bed, trying to fit chords to the lyrics before the melody was gone. Singing it in the shower to lodge it firmly in my memory. Humming it while I folded laundry downstairs, because I didn’t want Beck to hear me singing about a girl. All the while wanting the impossible, wanting what we all wanted: to outlast the summer.



Cole broke off his idle singing and said, “Of course, I like that one with the minor chord better, but I couldn’t work it out.” He made an attempt at a different chord. The guitar buzzed at him.



“The guitar,” I said, “will only obey its master.”



“Yeah,” Cole agreed, “but Grace isn’t here.” He grinned at me slyly. He strummed the same D chord. “That’s the only one I can play. Look at that. Ten years of piano lessons, Ringo, and you put a guitar in my hand and I’m a drooling baby.”



Even though I’d heard him play the piano on the NARKOTIKA album, it was surprisingly difficult to imagine Cole taking piano lessons. To learn a musical instrument, you had to have a certain tolerance for tedium and failure. An ability to sit still helped, too.



I watched lightning jump from cloud to cloud; the air was getting the heavy feeling that comes before a storm. “You’re putting your fingers too close to the fret. That’s why you’re buzzing. Move them farther behind the fret and press harder. Just your fingertips, too, not the pad.”



I didn’t think I’d described it very well, but Cole moved his fingers and played a chord perfectly, no buzzing or dead strings.



Looking dreamily up at the sky, Cole sang, “Just a good-lookin’ guy, sitting on a stump …” He looked back to me. “You’re supposed to sing the next line.”



It was a game that Paul and I had used to play, too. I considered if I was too annoyed at Cole for making fun of my music to play along. After a slightly too long pause, I added, mostly the same note, halfhearted, “Watching all the satellites.”



“Nice touch, emo-boy,” Cole said. Thunder rumbled distantly. He played yet another D chord. He sang, “I’ve got a one-way ticket to the county dump …”



I sat up on my elbows. Cole strummed for me and I sang, “’Cause I turn into a dog each night.”



Then I said, “Are you going to play that same chord for every single line?”



“Probably. It’s my best one. I’m a one-hit wonder.”



I reached for the guitar, and felt like a coward for doing it. To play this game with him felt like I was condoning the events of the night before; what he did to the house each week, what he did to himself every minute of every day. But as I took the guitar from him and strummed the strings lightly to see if it was in tune, it felt like a far more familiar language than any I would use to hold a serious conversation with Cole.



I played an F major.



“Now we’re cooking with gas,” Cole said. But he didn’t sing another line. Instead, now that I was sitting with the guitar, he took my place, lying down on the stump and staring at the sky. Handsome and put together, he looked as if he had been posed there by an enterprising photographer, like last night’s seizure hadn’t even fazed him. “Play the minor chord one.”



“Which —?”



“The good-bye one.”



I looked at the black woods and played an A minor. For a moment, there was no sound except for some sort of insect crying out from the woods.



Then Cole said, “No, sing the actual song.”



I thought of the little mocking change to his voice when he sang my summer girl lyrics and said, “No. I don’t — no.”



Cole sighed, as if he’d anticipated disappointment. Overhead, thunder rumbled, seemingly in advance of the storm cloud, which was cupping around the tops of the trees like a hand hiding a secret. Picking absently at the guitar because it made me feel calmer, I gazed upward. It was fascinating how the cloud, even between lightning flashes, seemed lit from within, collecting the reflected light of all the houses and cities that it passed over. It looked artificial in the black sky: purplish gray and sharply edged. It seemed impossible that something like it would exist in nature.



“Poor bastards,” Cole said, his gaze still on the stars. “They must get pretty tired of watching us make the same damn mistakes all the time.”



I suddenly felt incredibly lucky to be waiting. Because no matter how it gnawed at me, demanded my wakefulness, stole my thoughts, at the end of this endless waiting was Grace. What was Cole waiting for?



“Now?” Cole asked.



I stopped playing the guitar. “Now what?”



Cole shoved himself up and leaned back on his hands, still looking up. He sang, completely unself-conscious — but of course, why would he be? I was an audience two thousand bodies smaller than he was used to.



“One thousand ways to say good-bye, one thousand ways to cry …”



I strummed the A minor chord that started the song and Cole smiled a self-deprecating smile as he realized he’d started in the wrong key. I played the chord again, and this time I sang it, and I wasn’t self-conscious, either, because Cole had already heard me through my car speakers and thus couldn’t be disappointed:



One thousand ways to say good-bye



One thousand ways to cry



One thousand ways to hang your hat before you go outside



I say good-bye good-bye good-bye



I shout it out so loud



’Cause the next time that I find my voice



I might not remember how



As I sang good-bye good-bye good-bye, Cole began to sing the harmonies that I’d recorded on my demo. The guitar was a little out of tune — just the B string, it was always the B string — and we were a little out of tune, but there was something comfortable and companionable about it.



It was one frayed rope thrown across the chasm between us. Not enough to get across, but maybe just enough to tell that it wasn’t as wide as I’d originally thought.



At the end, Cole made the hissed haaaa haaaaa haaaa of fake audience noise. Then, abruptly, he stopped and looked at me, his head cocked. His eyes were narrowed, listening.



And then I heard them.



The wolves were howling. Their distant voices cadenced and melodic, discordant for a moment before falling back into harmonies. Tonight they sounded restless but beautiful — waiting, like the rest of us, for something we couldn’t quite name.



Cole was looking at me still, so I said, “That’s their version of the song.”



“Needs some work,” Cole replied. He looked at my guitar. “But not bad.”



We sat in silence then, listening to the wolves howling between bursts of thunder. I tried unsuccessfully to pick out Grace’s voice among them, but heard only the voices I’d grown up with. I tried to remind myself that I’d just heard her real voice on the phone earlier that afternoon. It didn’t mean anything that her voice was absent now.



“We don’t need the rain,” Cole said.



I frowned at him.



“Back into the compound, I suppose.” Cole slapped his arm and flicked an invisible insect off his skin with deft fingers. He stood up, tucked his thumbs into his back pockets, and faced the woods. “Back in New York, Victor —”



He stopped. Inside the house, I heard the phone ring. I made a mental note to ask him What about New York? but when I got inside, it was Isabel on the phone, and she told me that the wolves had killed a girl and that it wasn’t Grace but I needed to turn on the damn television.



I turned it on and Cole and I stood in front of the couch. He crossed his arms while I thumbed through the channels.



The wolves were indeed on the news again. Once upon a time, a girl had been attacked by the wolves of Mercy Falls. The coverage then had been brief and speculative. The word then was accident.



Now it was ten years later and a different girl was dead and the coverage was never-ending.



The word now was extermination.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN



GRACE



This was the nightmare.



Everything around me was solid black. Not the shape-filled black of my room at night, but the absolute depthless dark of a place with no light. Water splattered onto my bare skin, the driving sting of rain and then the heavier splash of water dripping from somewhere overhead.



All around me, I could hear the sound of the rain falling in a forest.



I was human.



I had no idea where I was.



Suddenly, light burst around me. Crouched and shaking, I had just enough time to see a forked snake of lightning strike beyond the black branches above me, my wet and dirty fingers outstretched before me, and the purple ghosts of tree trunks around me.



Then black.



I waited. I knew it was coming, but I still wasn’t prepared when —



The crack of thunder sounded like it came from somewhere inside me. It was so loud that I clapped my hands over my ears and ducked my head to my chest before the logical part of me took over. It was thunder. Thunder couldn’t hurt me.



But my heart was loud in my ears.



I stood there in the blackness — it was so dark that it hurt — and wrapped my arms around my body. Every instinct in me was telling me to find shelter, to make myself safe.



And then, again: lightning.



A flash of purple sky, a gnarled hand of branches, and



eyes.



I didn’t breathe.



It was dark again.



Black.



I closed my eyes, and I could still see the figure in negative: a large animal, a few yards away. Eyes on me, unblinking.



Now the hairs on my arms were slowly prickling, a slow, silent warning. Suddenly, all I could think about was that time when I was eleven. Sitting on the tire swing, reading. Glancing up and seeing eyes — and then being dragged from the swing.



Thunder, deafening.



I strained to hear the sound of an approach.