Forever

“A toast, for those of us who are drinking tonight,” he said. Not really standing, just half rising. “To Marshall, for believing this could be done. And to Jack, who can’t be here with us tonight” — he paused, then said — “but would be bugging us for a glass of his own if he were.”



I thought it was a crappy toast, even if it was true, but I let Dolly and the neighbor boy knock their glasses against my water glass. I sneered at the boy across the table and withdrew my glass before he could lift his to mine. I’d get the crumb out of my shirt later.



Marshall sat at the end of the table, and his voice boomed in a way that my father’s didn’t. He had a carrying, congressional sort of voice, the kind that sounded good saying things like Less of a tax burden on the middle class and Thank you for your donation and Honey, could you bring me my sweater with the duck on it? He said, conversational and resonant, “Did you know that you folks have the most dangerous wolves in North America?” He smiled, broad and pleased to share this information with us. His tie was loosened like he was here among friends, not working. “Until the Mercy Falls pack became active, there had been only two confirmed fatal wolf attacks in North America. Total. On humans, of course. Out west, they had quite a few livestock taken down, that’s for sure, that’s why they put that two hundred twenty wolf quota out there in Idaho.”



“That’s how many wolves the hunters could take?” asked Dolly.



“You betcha,” Marshall said, a Minnesota accent presenting itself so unexpectedly that I was surprised.



“That seems like a lot of wolves,” Dolly replied. “Do we have that many wolves here?”



My father broke in smoothly; in comparison to Marshall, he sounded more elegant, more cultured. Of course we were sitting in Il Pomodoro, so how cultured could he be, but still. “Oh, no, they estimate the Mercy Falls pack to be only twenty or thirty animals. At most.”



I wondered how Sam would take this conversation. I wondered what he and Cole had decided to do, if anything. I remembered that strange, resolute look on Sam’s face in the store, and it made me feel hollow and incomplete.



“Well, what makes our pack so dangerous, then?” Dolly wondered, her chin resting in a circle of her fingers. She was performing a trick that I’d done often enough to recognize. The interested ignorance routine was excellent for commanding attention.



“Familiarity with humans,” my father answered. He made a gesture at one of the waiters: We’re ready. “The big thing that keeps wolves away is fear, and once they have no fear, they’re just large, territorial predators. There have, in the past, in Europe, India, been wolf packs that were notorious man-killers.” There was no trace of emotion in his voice: When he said man-killer, he was not thinking Jack-killer. My father had a purpose now, a mission, and as long as he was focused on that, he would be fine. This was the old Dad, powerful and frustrating, but ultimately someone to be proud of and awed by. I hadn’t seen this version of my father since before Jack died.



I realized bitterly that if it hadn’t been Sam and Grace and Cole at stake, I would’ve been happy at this moment, even sitting in Il Pomodoro. My mother and father, smiling and chatting like old times. Just a small price to pay for all this. I could have my parents back — but I had to lose all of my real, true friends.



“Oh, no, they have significant populations in Canada,” my father was explaining to the man across from him.



“It’s not a numbers game,” Marshall added, because no one was going to say it if he didn’t. No one had any real response to that. We all jumped in surprise as the singer began again. I saw Marshall’s mouth clearly form My God, but you couldn’t hear him over the rushing soprano.



At the same time that I felt my phone vibrate against my leg, something tickled at my shirt collar. I looked up to see the muppet across the table grinning stupidly at me, having launched another crumb into my shirt. The music was too loud to say something to him this time, which was good, because everything I could think of involved four-letter words. Moreover, every time I looked to his side of the table, I thought again about Jack sitting here with us and how now we were all sitting around talking about the animals that had killed him and not about how he would never be sitting in this restaurant again. I jerked when something touched me again, this time my hair. It was the boy next to me, his fingers next to my temple.



“—got some in your hair,” the guy shouted over the singing. I held up my hand like Stop, just stop.



My father was leaning over the table toward Marshall, engaged in a benevolent shouting match, trying to be heard over something that sounded a lot like Bizet. I heard him shout, “From the air, you can see everything.” I retrieved my phone and flipped it open. Seeing Sam’s number made me feel a strange knot of nerves in my stomach. He’d sent me a text, full of typos.



we founf her. was badf but cole pulle through likea hero.



thjought youd want to know. s



It was hard to picture the words Cole and hero in the same sentence. Hero seemed to indicate some kind of gallantry. I tried to text back under the table, out of the view of helpful boy next to me and Dolly on the other side, saying just that I was at dinner listening to details and I’d talk later. Or come by. When I texted come by, I once again felt that twitch in my stomach, and a breathless rush of guilt, for no particular reason that I could name.



The singing stopped then, and there was clapping around me — Dolly had her hands up by her face and was clapping right by my ear — but my father and Marshall kept on talking, leaning on the table toward each other, as if there had never been any music.



My father’s voice was clear: “—drive them out from the woods, like we did before, but with more manpower, state blessing, Wildlife Services and all that, and once they’re north of Boundary Wood in the open, the helicopters and sharpshooters take over.”



“Ninety percent success rate in Idaho, you said?” Marshall asked. He had a fork poised over an appetizer like he was taking notes with it.



“Then the rest don’t matter,” my father said. “Without the pack, they can’t survive alone. Takes more than two wolves to take down enough game.”



My phone vibrated again in my hands, and I flipped it open. Sam, again.



i thoughtshe was going to die isabel. i am so relievef it hurts.



I heard the boy across the table laughing and knew that he’d thrown something else at me that I hadn’t felt. I didn’t want to glance up at him because I’d just see his face against the wall where Jack’s had been. Suddenly I knew that I was going to be sick. Not in the future, not in a “distinct possibility” way, but in a “right this moment I had to leave before I embarrassed myself” way.



I pushed back my chair, jostling it into Dolly, who was in the middle of asking a stupid question. I wound my way through tables and singers and appetizers made out of sea creatures that didn’t come from anywhere near Minnesota.



I got to the bathroom — one room, no stalls, all kitted out like a home bathroom instead of a restaurant bathroom — and shut myself inside. I leaned back against the wall, my hand over my mouth. But I wasn’t sick. I started to cry.



I shouldn’t have let myself, because I was going to have to go back out there, and I’d have a swollen, red nose and pink eyes and everyone would know — but I couldn’t stop. It was like they were choking me, my tears. I had to gasp to breathe around them. My head was full of Jack sitting at the table, being a jerk, the sound of my father’s voice talking about the sharpshooters in helicopters, the idea that Grace had nearly died without me even knowing it, stupid boys throwing stuff into my shirt, which was probably cut too low for a family dinner anyway, Cole looking down at me on the bed, and the thing that had set me off, Sam’s honest, broken text about Grace.



Jack was gone, my father always got what he wanted, I wanted and hated Cole St. Clair, and no one, no one would ever feel that way about me, the way that Sam felt about Grace when he sent that text.



I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom now, my back up against the cupboard beneath the sink. I remembered just how scathing I had been when I’d found Cole ruined on the floor of Beck’s house — not the last time, but when he’d told me he needed to get out of his body or kill himself. I’d thought he was so weak, so selfish, so self-indulgent. But I got it now. Right in that moment, if someone had said, Isabel, I can make it go away, take this pill … I might have taken it.



There was a knock on the door.



“It’s occupied,” I said, angry that my voice sounded thick and unlike me.



“Isabel?” My mother’s voice.



I had been crying so hard that my breath was hitching. I tried to speak evenly. “I’ll be out in a second.”



The knob turned. In my haste, I hadn’t locked the door.



My mother stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. I looked down, humiliated. Her feet were the only thing I could see, inches from my own. She was wearing the shoes I’d bought her. That made me want to cry again, and when I tried to swallow my sob, it made an awful strangled sound.



My mother sat down on the bathroom floor next to me, her back to the sink as well. She smelled like roses, like me. She put her elbows up on her knees and rubbed a hand over her composed Dr. Culpeper face.



“I’ll tell them you threw up,” my mother said.



I put my head in my hands.



“I’ve had three glasses of wine. So I can’t drive.” She took out the keys and held them low enough that I could see them through the crack between my fingers. “But you can.”



“What about Dad?”



“Dad can get a ride with Marshall. They’re a good couple.”



I looked up then. “They’ll see me.”



She shook her head. “We’ll go out the door on this side. We don’t have to go past the table. I’ll call him.” She used a tissue from her purse to dab my chin. “I hate this goddamn restaurant.”



“Okay,” I said.



“Okay?”



“Okay.”



She stood up and I took her hand so she could pull me up. “You shouldn’t sit on the floor, though — it’s filthy and you could pick up rotavirus or MRSA or something. Why do you have a piece of bread in your shirt?”



I picked the crumbs delicately out of my shirt. Standing next to each other in the mirror, my mother and I looked eerily similar, only my face was a tearful, disheveled ruin and hers was not. The exact opposite of the twelve months leading up to this point.



“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go before they start singing again.”



CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE



GRACE



I didn’t remember being woken up. I just remembered being. I sat up, blinking against the harsh light, cupping my face in my hands and smoothing my skin. I ached — not like from a shift, but like I had been caught under a landslide. Beneath me, the floor was a cold and unforgiving tile. There was no window and a row of blinding lightbulbs above the sink made everything permanent daylight.