Forever (9 page)

• 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 ante-room 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?”

Uneasiness budded slowly inside me. I didn't know if it was from the conversation, or the paint fumes, or Cole back at the store by himself, but it was there, nonetheless.

“I don't know,” I said, truthfully.

Grace's mom touched my arm. “If you find her before we do,” she said, “tell her I love her.”

I thought of Grace and that empty dress balled in my hand. Grace, far, far away and unreachable in the woods.

“No matter what?” I asked, though I didn't think she could possibly say it in a way that would convince me. I separated my hands; I realized I had been rubbing a thumb over one of my scarred wrists.

Amy's voice was firm. “No matter what.”

And I didn't believe her.

• ISABEL •

The problem with Cole St. Clair is that you could believe everything he said, and, also, you couldn't believe anything he said. Because he was just so grandiose that it was easy to believe he could accomplish the impossible. But he was also such an incredible dirtbag that you couldn't really trust a single thing he said, either.

The problem was that I
wanted
to believe him.

Cole hooked his fingers in his back pockets, as if proving that he wasn't going to touch me unless I made the first move. With all the books behind him, he looked like one of those posters you see in libraries, the ones with celebrities advocating literacy. C
OLE
S
T
. C
LAIR SAYS
NEVER STOP READING! He looked like he was enjoying himself up there on the moral high ground.

And he looked damn good.

I was reminded suddenly of a case that my dad had worked on. I didn't really remember the details properly — it was probably several different cases run together, actually — just some loser who'd been convicted of something in the past and was now being accused of something else. And my mom had said something like
Give him the benefit of the doubt
. I'd never forgotten my father's reply, because it was the first and only clever thing I thought he'd ever said:
People don't change who they are. They only change what they do with it.

So if my father was right, it meant that behind those earnest green eyes staring into mine, it was the same old Cole, perfectly capable of
being that person he was before, lying on the floor drunk out of his mind and working up the nerve to kill himself. I didn't know if I could take that.

I said finally, “And your cure for werewolfism was … epilepsy?”

Cole made a disinterested noise. “Oh, that was just a side effect. I'll fix it.”

“You could have died.”

He smiled, the wide, gorgeous smile that he knew very well was wide and gorgeous. “But I didn't.”

“I don't think that counts,” I said, “as not being suicidal.”

Cole's tone was dismissive. “Taking risks is not being suicidal. Otherwise, skydivers need serious help.”

“Skydivers have parachutes or whatever the hell it is skydivers have!”

Cole shrugged. “And I had you and Sam.”

“We didn't even know that you —” I broke off, because my phone was ringing. I stepped away from Cole to look at it. My dad. If there had ever been a time to let it go through to voicemail, this was it, but after my parents' tirade yesterday, I had to pick it up.

I was aware of Cole's eyes on me as I flipped the phone open. “Yeah, what?”

“Isabel?” My father's voice was both surprised and … buoyant.

“Unless you have another daughter,” I replied. “Which would explain a lot.”

My father acted like I hadn't spoken. He still sounded suspiciously good-tempered. “I dialed your number by accident. I meant to call your mother.”

“Well, no, you got me. What were you calling her for? You sound high,” I said. Cole's eyebrows jerked up.

“Language,” my father replied automatically. “Marshall just called me. The girl was the last straw. He's got word that our wolf pack is
coming off the protected list and they're setting up an aerial hunt. The state's going to do it — no rednecks with rifles this time. We're talking helicopters. They're going to do it properly, like Idaho.”

I said, “It's definitely happening?”

“Just a question of when they can schedule it,” my father said. “Collect the resources and manpower and all that.”

Somehow, that last sentence drove it home for me — “resources and manpower” was such a bullshit Marshall phrase that I could imagine my father repeating the words after hearing them on the phone only minutes before.

This was it.

Cole's face had changed from the lazily handsome expression he'd worn before. Now, something in my voice or face must have tipped him off, because he was looking at me in a sharp, intense way that made me feel exposed. I turned my face away.

I asked my father, “Do you have any idea of when? I mean, at all?”

He was talking to someone else. They were laughing and he was laughing back. “What? Oh, Isabel, I can't talk. A month, maybe, they said. We're working on moving it up, though — it's a question of the helo pilot and getting the area pinned down, I think. I'll see you when I get home. Hey — why aren't you in school?”

I said, “I'm in the bathroom.”

“Oh, well, you didn't have to pick up in school,” my father said. I heard a man say his name in the background. “I have to go. Bye, pumpkin.”

I snapped the phone shut and stared at the books in front of me. There was a biography of Teddy Roosevelt face-out.

“Pumpkin,” Cole said.

“Don't start.”

I turned and we just looked at each other. I wasn't sure how much
he'd heard. It didn't take much to get the gist. There was still something about Cole's face that was making me feel weird. Like before, life had always been a little joke that he found a little funny but mostly lame. But right now, in the face of this new information, this Cole was —
uncertain
. Just for two seconds, it was like I saw all the way down to the inside of him, and then the door
ding
ed open and that Cole was gone.

Sam stood in the doorway of the store, the door slowly swinging shut behind him.

“Bad news, Ringo,” Cole said. “We're going to die.”

Sam looked at me, a question in his eyes.

“My dad did it,” I said. “The hunt's going through. They're waiting on the helo pilot.”

Sam stood there by the front door for a long, long moment, his jaw working slightly. There was something odd and resolute about his expression. Behind him, the back of the open sign said
CLOSED
.

The silence stretched out so long that I was about to say something, and then Sam said, with strange formality, “I'm getting Grace out of those woods. The others, too, but she's my priority.”

Cole looked up at that. “I think I can help you there.”