Forever

“No. I just wanted to make sure that you —” Isabel stopped. There was a lot of noise behind her. “Grace, did Sam tell you they’d found a dead girl in the woods? Killed by wolves?”



I looked at Sam, but he couldn’t hear what Isabel had said.



“No,” I said, uneasy.



“Grace. They know who she was.”



Everything inside me was very quiet.



Isabel said, “It was Olivia.”



Olivia.



Olivia.



Olivia.



I saw everything around me with perfect precision. There was a photograph on the fridge of a man standing beside a kayak and giving a peace sign. There was also a dingy magnet in the shape of a tooth with a dental office’s name and number on it. Next to the fridge was a counter that had a few small nicks all the way down to some colorless surface. On it was an old glass Coca-Cola bottle that had a pencil and one of those pens that looked like a flower stuck in it. The kitchen tap dripped every eleven seconds, the drop of water running clockwise around the lip of the faucet before working up enough nerve to fall into the sink below. I’d never noticed how everything in this kitchen was a warm color. Browns and reds and oranges, all worked through the counters and cabinets and tiles and faded photographs stuck into the doors of the cabinets.



“What did you say?” Sam demanded. “What did you say to her?”



I couldn’t figure out why he would ask me that when I hadn’t said anything. I frowned at him and saw that he was holding the phone, which I didn’t remember giving to him.



I thought, I am a terrible friend because I don’t hurt at all. I’m just here looking at the kitchen and thinking that if it were mine, I’d find a rug for it so my feet wouldn’t be so cold on the bare floor. I must not have loved Olivia, then, because I don’t even feel like crying. I am thinking about rugs and not about how she’s dead.



“Grace,” Sam said. In the background, I saw Cole move off, holding the phone, talking into it. “What do you need from me?”



I thought it was a very strange question to ask. I just looked at him. “I’m okay,” I said.



Sam said, “You’re not.”



“I am,” I said. “I’m not crying. I don’t even feel like crying.”



He smoothed my hair back from my ears, pulling it behind my head like he was making a ponytail, holding it in his fist. Into my ear, he said, “But you will.”



I leaned my head on his shoulder; it seemed incredibly heavy just then, impossible to hold up. “I want to call people and find out if they’re okay. I want to call Rachel,” I said. “I want to call John. I want to call Olivia.” Too late, I realized what I’d said, and I opened my mouth as if I could somehow take it back and insert something more logical.



“Oh, Grace,” Sam said, touching my chin, but his pity was a distant thing.



On the phone, I heard Cole say, in a completely different voice than I’d ever heard him use before, “Well, there’s not much we can do about it now, is there?”



CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE



SAM



That night, Grace was the wakeful one. I felt like an empty cup, bobbing and tipping to admit rivulets of slumber; it was only a matter of time before it filled up enough to pull me under entirely.



My room was dark except for the Christmas lights strung around the ceiling, tiny constellations in a claustrophobic sky. I kept meaning to pull out the cord beside the bed and put us in darkness, but fatigue whispered in my ear and distracted me. I couldn’t understand how I could be so tired after I’d finally slept the night before. It was like my body had reacquired its taste for sleep now that I had Grace back, and it couldn’t get enough.



Grace sat next to me, her back leaned up against the wall, legs tangled in bedsheets, and ran the flat of her hand up and down my chest, which wasn’t helping me feel any more awake.



“Hey,” I murmured, reaching up toward her with my hand, my fingertips just barely able to brush her shoulder. “Come down here with me and sleep.”



She stretched out her fingers and rested them on my mouth; her face was wistful and not like her, a mask of Grace worn by another girl in this half-light. “I can’t stop thinking.” It was a familiar enough sentiment that I pushed up onto my elbows; her fingers slipped off my lips, back to my chest.



“You should be lying down,” I said. “That will help.”



Grace’s expression was doleful and unsure; she was a little girl. I sat up the rest of the way and pulled her toward me. Together we lay back against my headboard, her head lying on my chest where her hand had been before. She smelled like my shampoo.



“I can’t stop thinking about her,” Grace whispered, braver now that we weren’t looking at each other. “And then I start thinking about how I’m supposed to be at home right now, and, Sam, I don’t want to go back.”



I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I didn’t want her to go back, either, but I knew she wasn’t supposed to be here. If she were human, cured, I would’ve told her that we had to go back and talk to her parents. We would’ve made it work; we would’ve made them understand that we were serious, and then I would have lived without her in my bed until she moved in on the proper terms. I would’ve hated it, but I’d have lived with it. I’d told her I wanted to do it right with her, and I still did.



But now there was no right. Now Grace was a girl who was also a wolf, and as long as she said that she didn’t want to go back, and as long as I remained unsure of how her parents would react, this was where I wanted her. One day soon there would be hell to pay for these stolen moments together, but I didn’t think we were wrong to have them. I ran my fingers through her hair until I hit a tiny knot and had to pull them out to start again. “I won’t make you.”



“We have to figure it out eventually,” Grace said. “I wish I was eighteen. I wish I’d moved out a long time ago. I wish we were already married. I wish I didn’t have to think of a lie.”



At least I wasn’t the only one who thought that they wouldn’t do well with the truth. “Nothing,” I said, with utmost certainty, “will get solved tonight.” After I said it, I recognized, with some irony, Grace’s own reasoning, the statement that she had used many times before to try to lure me to sleep.



“It all just keeps going round and round and round,” Grace said. “Tell me a story.”



I stopped touching her hair because the repetitive comfort of it was making me fall asleep again. “A story?”



She said, “Like you told me about Beck teaching you to hunt.”



I tried to think of an anecdote, something that didn’t need too much explaining. Something that would make her laugh. Every Beck story seemed tainted now, colored by doubt. Everything about him that I hadn’t seen with my own eyes now felt apocryphal.



I cast about for another memory, and said, “That BMW wagon wasn’t the first car Ulrik had. When I first came here, he had a little Ford Escort. It was brown. And very ugly.”



Grace sighed, as if this were a comforting start to a bedtime story. She fisted a handful of my T-shirt; the action woke me up instantly and guiltily made me think of at least four things that were not bedtime stories or selfless ways to comfort a grieving girl.



I swallowed and focused on my memory instead. “There was a lot wrong with it. When you went over bumps, it would scrape on the ground. The exhaust, I think. Once, Ulrik hit a possum in town and he dragged it all the way back home.”



Grace laughed a small, soundless laugh, the sort you laugh when you know you’re expected to.



I pressed on. “It always smelled like something going wrong, too. Like brakes sticking or rubber burning or maybe just like he hadn’t got all the possum off.” I paused, remembering all the trips I’d made in that car, sitting in the passenger seat, waiting in the car while Ulrik ran into the grocery store for some beer or standing beside the road as Beck swore at the silent engine and asked me why he hadn’t just taken his own damn car. That was back in the days when Ulrik had been human a lot, when his bedroom had been right next to mine, and I used to get woken up by the sound of noisy lovemaking, though I was pretty sure Ulrik was alone. I didn’t tell Grace that part.



“It was the car that I used to drive to the bookstore,” I said. “Ulrik bought that BMW wagon from a guy who was selling roses by the side of the road in St. Paul, so I got the Escort. Two months after I’d gotten my license, I got a flat tire in it.” I’d been sixteen in the most naive sense of the word: simultaneously euphoric and terrified to be driving home from work by myself for the first time, and when the tire made an incredible noise that sounded like a gun going off by my head, I thought I might die.



“Did you know how to change tires?” Grace asked. She asked the question like she did.



“Not a chance. I had to pull it over in the slush by the side of the road and use the cell phone I’d just been given for my birthday to call Beck for help. First time I was using the phone, and it was to say I couldn’t change a flat tire. Totally unmanning.”



Grace laughed again, softly. “Unmanning,” she repeated.



“Unmanning,” I assured her, glad to hear that little laugh. I thought back to the memory. Beck had been a long time getting there, dropped off by Ulrik on his way to work. Ignoring my bleak expression, Ulrik waved cheerily at me from the window of the BMW: “Later, boy-o!” His wagon vanished into the oncoming gloom, the taillights neon red in the snow gray world.



“So Beck arrived,” I said, aware then that I had included an anecdote with Beck after all, though I hadn’t meant to. Maybe all of my anecdotes had Beck in them. “He said, ‘So you’ve killed the car, then?’



“He had been all bundled in coats and gloves and scarves, but despite them, he’d already been shivering. He’d whistled when he saw the comically deflated tire. ‘That’s a beauty. You run over a moose?’”



“Had you?” Grace asked.



“No,” I said. “Beck made fun of me and showed me where the spare tire was and —”



I dropped off. I’d meant to tell the story of when Ulrik had finally sold the Escort, how he’d cooked four pounds of bacon and put it in the trunk when people came to look at it because he’d read that real estate agents baked cookies to sell houses to women. Instead I’d somehow gotten sidetracked in my drowsiness and the story I’d started now ended with Beck’s smile vanishing in the time it took for headlights to come over the hill and disappear on the other side — with a pile of scarves and sweaters and gloves on the ground behind the Escort and me with a useless tire iron in my hand and the memory of Beck saying half my name as he shifted.



“And what?”



I tried to think if there was a way that I could spin the story, to make it more cheerful, but as I did, I remembered an aspect of it that I hadn’t thought about for years. “Beck shifted. I was still there with the damn tire iron and still was just as dumb as before.”