Forever (27 page)

Why did everything feel like saying good-bye?

The forest was noisy around us: birds singing, water splashing, wind whispering
sh-sh-sh
through the leaves; this was the sound of its breathing before we arrived and would keep being such after we left. The cloth of this natural world was made of private, unspoken sorrows, and ours was just another stitch on the hem.

“Sam.” Koenig stood at the base of the outcropping. Grace and I stepped back from each other. I had one of Grace's hairs in my mouth. I removed it. “Your phone rang and dropped the call before they could leave a message. There's not enough reception out here for anyone to get through, really. It was your home number.”

Cole.

“We should get back,” Grace said, already climbing down with the same aplomb that she'd made the ascent. She stood beside Koenig and together they surveyed the rock and the surrounding forest until I joined them.

Koenig made the smallest of head gestures to the forest around us. “What do you think?”

I looked at Grace, so Koenig did, too. She just nodded.

“You, too?” Koenig asked me.

I smiled ruefully.

“That's what I thought,” he said. “This is a good place to be lost.”

• COLE •

In one hour, I called Sam's cell phone as many times as I'd called Isabel's cell phone in two months. To the same effect. Nothing. I could take it personally, but I liked to think that I'd learned my lesson. Patience. It was a virtue.

It had never been one of my strong points.

I called Sam. The phone rang and rang until my ears were tricked into believing that every other ring was longer.

The minutes stretched out indefinitely. I put on music, and even the songs moved in slow motion. I was irritated every time a refrain came around; it felt like I'd already listened to it one hundred times before.

I called Sam.

Nothing.

I trotted down the basement stairs, up to the kitchen. I'd cleaned my stuff up, mostly, but in the spirit of benevolence and distracting myself, I used a wet paper towel to wipe the kitchen counter and make a small pyramid of escaped coffee grounds and toaster crumbs.

I called Sam. More ringing. I jogged back down to the basement, then to my stash of things in my bedroom. I rummaged through all the supplies I'd gathered over the past several months, not really needing anything, just wanting to be busy, to move my hands. My feet ran whether or not I was standing up, so I might as well stand.

I called Sam.

Ring, ring, ring, ring. Ring, ring. Ring, ring.

I got a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and took them down to the basement. I laid them on the chair. Wondered if I should get a long-sleeved shirt or a sweater. No. A T-shirt was fine. No. Maybe a sweater. I got a Berkeley sweatshirt out of a drawer.

I called Sam.

Nothing.
Nothing.
Where in hell was he?

I jotted in Beck's notebook that was now mine. I went back down to the basement. I checked the thermostat. I turned it as hot as it would go. I got space heaters from the garage. I found wall sockets in the basement and plugged them in. It was a barbecue down there. Not hot enough. I needed it to be summer inside these walls.

I called Sam.

Two rings. Three.

“Cole, what is it?” It was Sam. His voice was staticky, indistinct, but it was him.

“Sam,” I said. I sounded a little peevish at this point, but I felt I deserved it. I looked down at the wolf body on the floor in front of me. The sedatives were starting to wear off. “I've caught Beck.”

• SAM •

I hadn't realized until Cole caught Beck that it was Chinese Day.

For the longest time, I'd thought Chinese Day was a real holiday. Every year on the same day in May, Ulrik or Paul and whoever else was there would take me and Shelby and head out for a day of festivities — balloon in my hand, museums visited, fancy cars we didn't intend to buy taken for test drives — that concluded with an epic meal at Fortune Garden in Duluth. I didn't eat much but the spring rolls and fortune cookies, but the association with the day of revelry made it my favorite restaurant regardless. We always ended up with a dozen white takeaway boxes that populated the refrigerator for weeks. Long after dark, we'd pull into the driveway and I'd have to be dragged and prodded up the stairs to bed.

Beck never came with us. Paul gave a different excuse every year.
He has work and needs us out of the house
or
He was up late
or
He doesn't celebrate Chinese Day
. I didn't think about it, really. There were plenty of other things going on that day to hold my attention. The truth was I was young and self-involved and, in the way of youth, I didn't think about what my guardians did when I wasn't with them. It was easy for me to imagine Beck working hard in his home office on that day, if I imagined anything at all.

So for years, Chinese Day came and went. Up at the crack of dawn and out of the house. As I got older, I began to see more details that I'd missed when I was younger. As we left, Ulrik or Paul would always
take the phone off the hook, and they'd lock the front door behind us, as if no one were home.

By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I no longer fell asleep the moment we got home. Usually I would feign sleepiness so that I could retreat to my room with whatever new book or possession I'd acquired on that particular Chinese Day. I would creep out of my room only to pee before I finally turned out my light. One year, though, as I left my room, I heard — something. I still don't remember what it was about the sound that made me pause in the hall. Something about it was out of place, unfamiliar.

So for the first time, I silently padded past the bathroom toward where Beck's bedroom door was cracked open. I hesitated, listening, glancing behind me to make certain I wasn't being watched. And then I took another soundless step forward so that I could see into Beck's room.

The small lamp on his bedside table weakly illuminated his room. There was a plate in the middle of the floor with an untouched sandwich and browning slices of apple on it, and a full coffee mug beside it, an ugly ring around the edge where the milk had separated. A few feet away from that, sitting on the floor at the end of the bed, facing away from me, was Beck. There was something shocking to me about his posture, something that later I could never forget. His knees were drawn up to his chest like a boy's and his hands were laced behind his head, pulling it down toward his body as if he were protecting it from an oncoming blast.

I didn't understand. And then I heard the soft sound again, and saw his shoulders shake. No, not his shoulders, but his entire body, a tremble more than a shake, the intermittent, silent sobs of someone who has been at it for a while and is saving his strength for the long haul still to come.

I remember feeling nothing but absolute surprise that Beck should have had something like this living inside him and that I had never known, never even guessed. Later I'd learn it was not the only secret Beck had, just maybe the best-kept one.

I left Beck up there, him and his private grief, and I went downstairs to find Ulrik, flipping listlessly through television stations in the living room.

I said simply, “What's wrong with him?”

That was how I learned about Beck's wife, and how she had died on this day in May, nine years earlier. Right before I was bitten. I hadn't made the connection, or if I had, it wasn't in any important way, not in any way that mattered.

Now, it mattered.

• SAM •

As we pulled into the driveway, my cell phone rang again. Koenig didn't even put the truck into park. He put his foot on the brake pedal. He looked at his watch and then in his rearview mirror as we climbed out.

“Are you coming in?” Grace asked him, leaning in. It hadn't occurred to me that he might want to.

“No,” Koenig said. “I'm pretty sure that whatever is going on in there is — I would just prefer to have plausible deniability. I never saw you today. You are talking to your parents later, correct?”

Grace nodded. “I am. Thanks. For everything.”

“Yes,” I said. It wasn't really enough. The phone was still ringing. It was still Cole. I needed to say more to Koenig, but — Beck. Beck was in there.

“Call me later, when you decide,” Koenig said. “And, Sam, pick up your phone.”

Grace shut the door and patted the side of the truck, twice, sending Koenig off.

“I'm here,” I said, into the phone.

“Took you long enough,” Cole said. “Did you walk back?”

“What?” I asked. The afternoon light was coming in strong and low through the pine trees; I had to blink and look the other way. I thought I hadn't understood him right. “I'm in the driveway now.”

Cole paused before saying, “Good thing, too. Hurry the hell up. And if you get bitten, remember, this was your idea.”

I asked Cole, “Do I even want to know?”

“I may have misjudged doggie tranquilizer dosages. Not everything you read online is true. Apparently wolves require more than neurotic German shepherds.”

“Jesus,” I said. “So Beck is loose in the house? Just wandering around?”

Cole's voice sounded a little terse. “I'd like to point out that I did the impossible part for you already. I got him out of the woods.
You
can get him out of your bedroom.”

We hurried to the front door. In this light, the windows of the house were mirrors full of the sun. Once upon a time, this would be dinnertime. I'd be walking into a house full of microwaved leftovers, pending algebra homework, Iron Butterfly pounding out of the speakers, and Ulrik playing air drums. Beck would say: “Someone once said European men had great taste. That someone got it really wrong.” The house would feel filled to capacity; I'd retreat to my room for some peace.

I missed that sort of noise.

Beck. Beck was here.

Cole made a hissing sound. “Are you inside yet? God bless America and all her sons. What is taking you so long?”

The front door was locked. “Here, talk to Grace,” I said.

“Mommy isn't going to give me a different answer than Daddy,” Cole said, but I handed her the phone anyway.

“Talk to him. I have to get my keys out.” I dug in my pocket and unlocked the front door.

“Hi,” said Grace. “We're coming in.” She hung up on him.

I pushed open the front door and blinked to get used to the dimness. The first impression I got was of red striped over the furniture,
the long afternoon light coming in the window and lying over the furniture. There was no sign of Cole or a wolf. He was not upstairs, despite his sarcastic response.

My phone rang.

“Sheesh,” Grace said, handing it to me.

I held it to my ear.

“Basement,” Cole said. “Follow the smell of burning flesh.”

I found the basement door open and heat emanating from the stairs. Even from here, I could smell wolf: nerves and damp forest floor and growing spring things. As I descended the stairs into the dim brown light of the basement, my stomach twisted with anxiety. At the bottom of the stairs, Cole stood with his arms crossed. He cracked every knuckle on his right hand with his thumb and started on his left. Behind him, I saw space heaters, the source of the choking heat.

“Finally,” Cole said. “He was a lot groggier fifteen minutes ago. What took you so long? Did you go to Canada? Did you have to invent the internal combustion engine before you could leave?”

“It was a couple of hours' drive.” I looked at the wolf. He lay in an unlikely, twisted position that no fully conscious animal would adopt. Half on his side, half pushed up onto his chest. Head weaving, eyes half closed, ears limp. My pulse was shallow and fast, a moth destroying itself on a light.

“Speeding was an option,” Cole said. “Cops don't get tickets.”

“Why the heaters?” I asked. “That won't make him change.”

“Might keep a career werewolf human a little longer if this works,” Cole said. “If we don't all get savaged first, which is a possibility if we dick around for much longer.”

“Shh,” Grace said. “Are we doing this or not, Sam?”

She looked at me, not Cole. The decision was mine.

I joined her in a crouch beside the wolf, and at my presence, his joints jerked as he became suddenly responsive. His ears were instantly more alert and his eyes flicked to meet mine. Beck's eyes. Beck.
Beck.
My heart hurt. I waited for that moment of recognition from him, but it never came. Just that gaze, and then uncoordinated paws scrabbling, trying to move his drugged body.

Suddenly the idea of sticking him with a needle full of epinephrine and God knew what else seemed ludicrous. This wolf was so firmly a wolf that Beck could never be pulled out of him. There was nothing here but Beck's eyes with no Beck behind them. My mind grabbed at lyrics, something to get me out of this moment, something to save me.

The idea of seeing him again, just
seeing
him, as him, was such a powerful one. I hadn't realized until this moment how much I had wanted it. Needed it.

Cole crouched down next to us, the syringe in his hand. “Sam?” But really, he was looking at Grace, who was looking at me.

Instantly, my brain replayed that second where the wolf's eyes met mine. His gaze, without any understanding or reasoning behind it. We had no idea what we were working with here. No idea what effect the drugs would have on him. Cole had already guessed wrong on the dosage for the Benadryl. What if what he had in that syringe killed Beck? Could I live with that? I knew what choice I would make —
had
made — in the same situation. Given the choice between dying
and having the chance to become human, I'd taken the risk. But I had been given the choice. I had been able to say yes or no.

“Wait,” I said. The wolf was starting to stumble to his feet, his upper lip pulling back slowly from his teeth in a warning.

But then there was this: me pushed into the snow, my life traded for this one, car doors slamming, Beck making the plan to bite me,
taking
everything away from me. I had never had a choice; it was simply forced upon me on one day that could've been no different from any other day in my life. He'd made the decision for me. So this was fair. No yes or no then. No yes or no now.

I wanted this to work. I wanted it to make him human so I could demand an answer to every question I'd never asked. I wanted to force him into a human so that he could see my face one last time and tell me why he'd done this to me out of every human being on the planet, why me, why anyone,
why
. And, impossibly, I wanted to see him again so I could tell him I missed him so badly.

I wanted it.

But I didn't know if he did.

I looked at Cole. “No. No, I changed my mind. I can't do it. I'm not that person.”

Cole's green eyes, brilliant, held mine for a moment. He said, “But I am.”

And, fast as a snake, he stuck the needle into the wolf's thigh.

• COLE •

“Cole,”
Grace snapped. “I can't believe you! I just can't —”

Then the wolf twitched, stumbling back from us, and Grace fell silent. It was convulsing with angular spasms that racked its body in time with a rapidly ascending pulse. It was impossible to tell if we were
witnessing death or rebirth. A spasm rippled along the wolf's coat, and it jerked its head upward in a violent, unnatural movement. A slow, ascending whine escaped from its nostrils.

It was working.

The wolf's mouth cracked open in a gesture of silent agony.

Sam turned his head away.

It was working.

I wanted, in that moment, to have my father standing there, watching, so I could say:
Look at this. For every test of yours I couldn't do, look at this.
I was on fire with it.

In a sudden, shivering movement, the wolf backed out of its skin and lay on the worn carpet at the base of the stairs. No longer a wolf. He was stretched out on his side, fingers clawed into the carpet, muscles hard and stringy over prominent bones. Colorless scars nicked his back, like it was a shell instead of skin. I was fascinated. It was not a man, it was a sculpture of a man-shaped animal, made for endurance and hunting.

Sam's hands were limp at his sides. Grace was looking at me, her face furious.

But I was looking at Beck.

Beck.

I had pulled him out of that wolf.

I walked my fingers across the wall until I found the light switch at the base of the stairs. As yellow light pooled in the basement, illuminating the bookshelves that lined the walls, he jerked to cover his eyes with his arm. His skin was still twitching and crawling, as if it wasn't sure it wanted to remain in its current form. With all of the space heaters humming down here, the temperature was suffocating. The heat was pushing me so firmly into my human skin that I couldn't imagine being anything else. If this inferno didn't keep him human, nothing would.

Sam silently climbed the stairs to shut the basement door to eliminate any drafts.

“You are really lucky that didn't turn out badly,” Grace said, her voice low, for me alone.

I raised an eyebrow at her and then looked back to Beck. “Hey,” I said to him, “once you're done with all that, I have clothing for you. You can thank me later.”

The man made a soft sound as he exhaled and shifted positions, the sort of sound someone makes without thinking when they're in pain. He pushed his upper body off the ground in a move that seemed more wolf than man, and finally, he looked at me.

It was months ago, and I was lying in the body I'd ruined.

There is another way out of all this
, he had said.
I can get you out of this world. I can make you disappear
.
I can fix you.

After all this time — it felt like years since he had injected me with the werewolf toxin — here he was again. It was a pretty damn perfect piece of circularity: The man who'd made me a werewolf was the wolf that I'd made into a man.

It was clear from his eyes, though, that his mind was still far, far away. He had pulled himself into an odd, animal position somewhere between sitting and crouching, and he regarded me warily. His hands were shaking. I didn't know if that was from the change or from me sticking him.

“Tell me when you recognize me,” I said to him. I got the sweatpants and sweatshirt from the chair I'd left them on, never quite turning my back to him.

I balled the fabric and tossed it in Beck's direction. The clothing
swuff
ed gently to the ground in front of him, but he didn't pay attention to it. His eyes glanced from me to the bookshelves behind me to the ceiling. I could actually see the expression in them transition, ever
so slowly, from escape to recognition as he rebooted as Beck, the man, instead of Beck, the wolf.

Finally, he jerkily pulled on the sweatpants and faced me. He left the sweatshirt lying on the floor. “How did you do this?” He looked away from me, as if he didn't expect me to have the answer, and instead looked at his hands, his fingers spread wide. He studied both sides of them, backs and then palms, his eyebrows drawn together. It was such a strange, intimate gesture that I glanced away. It reminded me of our funeral for Victor for some reason.

“Cole,” he said, and his voice was thick and gravelly. He cleared his throat, and his voice was a little better the second try. “How did you do this?”

“Adrenaline.” It was the simplest answer. “And some of adrenaline's friends.”

“How did you know it would work?” Beck asked, and then, before I had a chance to reply, he answered himself. “You didn't. I was the experiment.”

I didn't reply.

“Did you know it was me?”

No point lying. I nodded.

Beck looked up. “I'd rather that you had known. There are wolves that should stay wolves in those woods.” He suddenly seemed to realize that Grace was standing opposite from me. “Grace,” he said. “Sam — did it work? Is he —?”

“It worked,” Grace said softly. Her arms were crossed tightly in front of her. “He's human. He hasn't shifted back since then.”

Beck closed his eyes and tipped his head back, his shoulders collapsing. I watched him swallow. It was naked relief, and it was sort of hard to watch. “Is he here?”

Grace looked at me.

I heard Sam's voice from the stairs, sounding like nothing I'd ever heard from him.

“I'm here.”

• SAM •

Beck.

I couldn't keep my thoughts together. They scattered down the stairs, across the floor.

he is a hand on my shoulder

car tires hissing on wet pavement

his voice narrates my childhood

the smell of the forest on my suburban street

my handwriting looks like his

wolves

he shouts across the house,
sam, homework

snow pressed against my skin

hold on
, he said.
don't be afraid. you're still sam

my skin rips open

my new desk for all my books