Forever

“I’m not playing mind games with you,” she said.



I looked at the coffee cups she’d brought in. One for her, one for Sam. Such generosity seemed unlike the Isabel I knew. “Would you play mind games with Sam?” I asked.



Isabel stared at me for a long moment, and then she shook her head. “God, could you be any more insecure?”



The answer to that question was always yes, but I didn’t appreciate her bringing up my less public vices. I leaned forward to examine the two drinks, while Isabel gazed at me with slow death simmering in her eyes. Removing the lids, I looked at the contents. One of them was something that smelled suspiciously healthy. Green tea, maybe, or possibly horse pus. The other one was coffee. I took a drink of the coffee. It was bitter and complicated, just enough cream and sugar to make it drinkable.



“That,” she said, “was mine.”



I smiled broadly at her. I didn’t feel like smiling, but I hid that by smiling bigger. “And now it’s mine. Which means we’re almost even.”



“God, Cole, what? Even for what?”



I looked at her and waited for it to come to her. Fifty points if she got it in thirty seconds. Twenty points if she got it in a minute. Ten points if she got it in … Isabel just crossed her arms and looked out the window as if she were waiting for paparazzi to descend on us. Amazingly, she was so angry that I could smell it. My wolf senses were on fire with it; my skin prickled. Buried instincts were telling me to react. Fight. Flight. Neither seemed applicable. When she didn’t say anything, I shook my head and made a little phone gesture by my ear.



“Oh,” Isabel said, and she shook her head. “Are you serious? Still? The calls? Come on, Cole. I wasn’t going to do that with you. You’re toxic.”



“Toxic?” I echoed. Actually, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t flattered. There was a strength to that word that was tempting. Toxic. “Yes, toxicity. It’s one of my finer features. Is this because I didn’t sleep with you? Funny, normally girls yell at me because I did screw them.”



She gave her hard little laugh: Ha. Ha. Ha. Her heels clicked as she strode around the counter to stand right next to me. Her breath was hot on my face; her anger was louder than her voice. “This look on my face is because I was standing this close to you two nights ago, watching you twitch and drool because of whatever you’d stuck in your veins. I pulled you out of that hole once. I’m on the edge looking in anyway, Cole. I can’t be around someone else who is. You’re dragging me down with you. I’m trying to get out.”



And again, this is how Isabel always worked her magic on me. That little bit of honesty from her — and it wasn’t that much — took the wind out of my sails. The anger I’d felt before was strangely hard to sustain. I took my legs off the counter, slowly, one at a time, and then I turned on the stool so I was facing her. Instead of backing up to give me more room, she stayed right there, standing between my legs. A challenge. Or maybe a surrender.



“That,” I said, “is a lie. You only found me in the rabbit hole because you were already down there.”



She was so close to me that I could smell her lipstick. I was painfully aware that her hips were only an inch away from my thighs.



“I’m not going to watch you kill yourself,” Isabel said. A long minute passed where we heard nothing but the roar of a delivery truck as it drove down the street outside. She was looking at my mouth, and suddenly she looked away. “God, I can’t stay here. Just tell Sam I’ll call him.”



I reached out and put my hands on her hips as she tried to turn. “Isabel,” I said. One of my thumbs was on bare skin, right above the waist of her jeans. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”



“Just chasing a high?” She attempted to turn again; I held on. I wasn’t holding tight enough to keep her, but she wasn’t pulling hard enough to get away, so we stayed as we were.



“I wasn’t trying to get high. I was trying to become a wolf.”



“Whatever. Semantics.” Isabel wouldn’t look at me now.



Letting go of her, I stood up so that we were face-to-face. I’d learned a long time ago that one of the finest weapons in my arsenal was my ability to invade personal space. She turned to look at me and it was her eyes and my eyes and I felt a surging sensation of rightness, of saying the right thing at the right time to the right person, that too-rare sensation of having the right thing to say and believing it, too:



“I’m only going to say this once, so you better believe me the first time. I’m looking for a cure.”



CHAPTER TWENTY



SAM



She — Amy, I tried to think of her as Amy instead of as Grace’s mother — wrangled the door open and led me through a shady anteroom in a more muted purple than the front, and then into a startlingly bright main room full of canvases. The light was pouring in through the back wall of windows, which looked out onto a shabby lot with old tractors parked in it. If you ignored the view, the space itself was professional and classy — light gray walls, like a museum, with picture wires hanging from white molding along the ceiling. Paintings hung on the walls and leaned against the corners; some of them looked like they were still wet.



“Water?” she asked.



I stood in the middle of the room and tried not to touch anything. It took me a moment to put the word water in context: to drink, not to drown in.



“I’m fine,” I told her.



Before, when I’d seen Amy’s work, it had been strange and whimsical — animals in urban areas, lovers painted in odd colors. But all the canvases I saw now had been drained of life. Even if they were paintings of places — alleys and barns — they felt like barren planets. There were no animals, no lovers. No focal point. The only canvas that had any subject was the one currently on her easel. It was a huge canvas, nearly as tall as I was, and it was all white except for a very small figure sitting in the lower left corner. The girl’s back was to the viewer, shoulders hunched up, dark blond hair down her back. Even facing away, it was unmistakably Grace.



“Go ahead, psychoanalyze me,” Amy said as I looked at the paintings.



“I’m trying to quit,” I said. And making that little joke felt like a cheat, like last night, when I’d played the singing-the-next-line game with Cole when I should’ve been grilling him. I was consorting with the enemy.



“Say what you’re thinking, then,” she said. “You make me nervous, Sam. Did I ever say that? I guess I should have. Here, I’ll say it. You never said anything when you were with Grace, and I didn’t know how to deal with that. Everyone says something to me. I can make anyone talk. The longer you went without saying anything, the more I wondered what the problem was.”



I looked at her. I knew I was only proving her point, but I didn’t know what to say.



“Oh, now you’re just messing with me,” she went on. “What are you thinking?”



I was thinking lots of things, but most of them needed to stay thoughts, not words. All of them were angry, accusatory. I turned toward the Grace on the canvas, her back toward me, an effective barrier. “I was thinking that that is not a Grace that I ever knew.”



She walked across the studio to stand next to me. I moved away from her. I was subtle, but she noticed it. “I see. Well, this is the only Grace I know.”



I said, slowly, “She looks lonely. Cold.” I wondered where she was.



“Independent. Stubborn.” Amy let out a sudden sigh and whirled away from me, making me start. “I didn’t think I was being a horrible mother. My parents never gave me any privacy. They read every book I read. Went to every social event I went to. Strict curfew. I lived under a microscope until I got to college and then I never went home again. I still don’t talk to them. They still look at me under that giant glass.” She made a binoculars motion at me. “I thought we were great, me and Lewis. As soon as Grace started wanting to do stuff on her own, we let her. I won’t lie — I was really happy to have my social life back, too. But she was doing great. Everyone said that their kids were acting out or doing badly in school. If Grace had started doing badly, we would’ve changed.”



It didn’t sound like a confession. It sounded like an artist’s statement. Conflict distilled into sound bites for the press. I didn’t look at Amy. I just looked at that Grace on the canvas. “You left her all alone.”



There was a pause. She hadn’t expected me to say anything, maybe. Or maybe she just hadn’t expected me to disagree. “That’s not true,” she said.



“I believe what she told me. I saw her cry over you guys. That was real. Grace isn’t dramatic.”



“She never asked for more,” Amy said.



Now I looked at Amy — fixed her with my yellow eyes. I knew it made her uncomfortable; it made everyone uncomfortable. “Really?”



Amy held my gaze for a few seconds and then looked away. I thought she was probably wishing she had left me on the sidewalk.



But when she looked back, her cheeks were wet and her nose was getting unbecomingly red. “Okay, Sam. No bullshit, right? I know there were times I was selfish. There were times I saw what I wanted to see. But it goes both ways, Sam — Grace wasn’t the warmest daughter in the world, either.” She turned away to wipe her nose on her blouse.



“Do you love her?” I asked.



She rested her cheek against her shoulder. “More than she loves me.”



I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how much Grace loved her parents. I wished I was with her instead of here, in this studio, not knowing what to say.



Amy walked to the adjacent bathroom. I heard her blow her nose loudly before she returned from the bathroom. She stopped several feet away from me, dabbing her nose with a tissue. She had the weird look on her face that people get when they’re about to be more serious than they are used to.



“Do you love her?” she asked.



I felt my ears burn, though I wasn’t embarrassed by how I felt. “I’m here,” I said.



She chewed her lip and nodded at the floor. Then, not looking at me, she asked, “Where is she?”



I didn’t move.



After a long moment, she lifted her eyes to me. “Lewis thinks you killed her.”



It didn’t feel like anything. Not yet. Right now, they were just words.



“Because of your past,” she said. “He said that you were too quiet and strange, and that your parents had messed you up. That there was no way you couldn’t be ruined after that, and that you’d killed Grace when you found out he wouldn’t let her see you again.”



My hands wanted to make themselves into fists by my sides, but I thought that would look bad, so I forced them to hang, loose. They felt like deadweights at my sides, swollen and not belonging to my body. All the while, Amy was watching me, gauging my reaction.



I knew she wanted words, but I didn’t have any that I wanted to say. I just shook my head.



She smiled a sad little smile. “I don’t think you did. But then — where is she, Sam?”