Linger (2 page)

“Nicely done, boy wonder,” Isabel said, rising from amongst the nonfiction books with a scuffling sound on the carpet. “You hardly sounded psychotic at all.”

I didn't reply. All of the things the cop could've asked about were running through my head, leaving me feeling more nervous now than when he'd been here. He could've asked about where Beck was. Or if I'd heard about three missing kids from Canada. Or if I knew anything about the death of Isabel Culpeper's brother.

“What is your problem?” Isabel asked, a lot closer this time. She slid a stack of books onto the counter with her credit card on top. “You completely handled it. They're just doing routine stuff. He's not really suspicious. God, your hands are shaking.”

“I'd make a terrible criminal,” I replied — but that wasn't why my hands were trembling. If Grace had been here, I would have told her the truth: that I hadn't spoken to a cop since my parents had been sent to jail for slashing my wrists. Just seeing Officer Koenig had dredged up a thousand things I hadn't thought about in years.

Isabel's voice dripped scorn. “Good thing, too, because you aren't doing anything criminal. Stop freaking out, and do your book-boy thing. I need the receipt.”

I rang up her books and bagged them, glancing at the empty street every so often. My head was a jumbled-up mess of police uniforms, wolves in the woods, and voices I hadn't heard for a decade.

As I handed her the bag, the old scars on my wrists throbbed with buried memories.

For a moment, Isabel looked like she was going to say something more, and then she just shook her head and said, “Some people are really not cut out for deception. See you later, Sam.”

• COLE •

I have had no thought other than this: Stay alive.

And to have had only that thought, each day, was heaven.

We wolves ran through the sparse pine trees, our paws light on ground damp with the memory of snow. We were so close together, shoulders bumping against one another, jaws snapping playfully, bodies ducking beneath and leaping over one another like fish in a river, that it was impossible to tell where one wolf began and another ended.

Moss rubbed to bare dirt and markings on trees guided us through the woods; I could smell the rotting, growing smell of the lake before I could hear water splashing. One of the other wolves sent out a quick image: ducks gliding smoothly onto the cold blue surface of the lake. From a second wolf: a deer and her fawn walking on trembling legs to get a drink.

For me, there was nothing beyond this moment, these traded images and this silent, powerful bond.

And then, for the first time in months, I suddenly remembered that, once, I'd had fingers.

I stumbled, falling out of the pack, my shoulders bunching and twitching. The wolves wheeled, some of them doubling back to encourage me to rejoin them, but I could not follow. I twisted on the ground, slimy spring leaves pasted to my skin, the heat of the day clogged in my nostrils.

My fingers turned over the fresh black earth, jamming it beneath nails suddenly too short to defend me, smearing it in eyes that now saw in brilliant color.

I was Cole again, and spring had come too soon.

• ISABEL •

The day the cop came into the bookstore was the first day I had ever heard Grace complain of a headache. It probably doesn't sound that remarkable, but since I met Grace, she had never mentioned so much as a runny nose. Also, I was something of an expert on headaches. They were a hobby of mine.

After watching Sam dance clumsily with the cop, I headed back to school, which by this stage in my life had become sort of redundant. The teachers didn't really know what to do with me, caught as they were between my good grades and my terrible attendance record, so I got away with a lot. Our uneasy agreement basically came down to this: I'd come to class and they'd let me do what I wanted to do, as long as I didn't corrupt the other students.

So the first thing I did when I got to Computer Arts was dutifully log in to my computer station and undutifully pull out the books I'd bought that morning. One of them was an illustrated encyclopedia of diseases — fat, dusty-smelling, and bearing a copyright of 1986. The thing was probably one of the first books The Crooked Shelf had stocked. While Mr. Grant
outlined what we were supposed to be doing, I flipped through the pages, looking for the most gruesome images. There was a photograph of someone with porphyria, someone else with seborrheic dermatitis, and an image of roundworms in action that made my stomach turn over, surprising me.

Then I flipped to the
M
section. My fingers ran down the page to
meningitis, bacterial
. The back of my nose stung as I read the entire section. Causes. Symptoms. Diagnosis. Treatment. Prognosis. Mortality rate of untreated bacterial meningitis: 100 percent. Mortality rate of treated bacterial meningitis: 10 to 30 percent.

I didn't need to look it up; I already knew the stats. I could've recited the whole entry. I knew more than this 1986 encyclopedia of diseases did, too, because I had read all the online journals about the newest treatments and unusual cases.

The seat next to me creaked as someone sat down; I didn't bother to close the book as she rolled over in her chair. Grace always wore the same perfume. Or, knowing Grace, used the same shampoo.

“Isabel,” Grace said, in a relatively low voice — other students were chattering now as the project was under way. “That's positively morbid — even for you.”

“Bite me,” I replied.

“You need therapy.” But she said it lightly.

“I'm getting it.” I looked up at her. “I'm just trying to find out how meningitis worked. I don't think it's morbid. Don't you want to know how Sam's little problem worked?”

Grace shrugged and turned back and forth in the swivel-back chair, her dark blond hair falling across her flushed cheeks
as she dropped her gaze to the floor. She looked uncomfortable. “It's over now.”

“Sure,” I said.

“If you're going to be cranky, I'm not going to sit next to you,” Grace warned. “I don't feel good, anyway. I'd rather be home.”

“I just said ‘sure,'” I said. “That's not cranky, Grace. Believe me, if you want me to bring out the inner —”

“Ladies?” Mr. Grant appeared at my shoulder and looked at my blank screen and Grace's black one. “Last time I checked, this was a Computer Arts class, not a social hour.”

Grace looked up earnestly at him. “Do you think I could go to the nurse? My head — I think I have a sinus thing coming on or something.”

Mr. Grant looked down at her pink cheeks and pensive expression, and nodded his permission. “I want a note back from the office,” he told her, after Grace thanked him and stood up. She didn't say anything to me as she left, just knocked on the back of my chair with her knuckles.

“And you —” Mr. Grant said. Then he dropped his gaze down to the encyclopedia and its still-open page, and he never finished his sentence. He just nodded, as if to himself, and walked away.

I turned back to my extracurricular study of death and disease. Because no matter what Grace thought, I knew that in Mercy Falls, it's never over.

• GRACE •

By the time Sam got home from the bookstore that evening, I was making New Year's resolutions at the kitchen table.

I'd been making New Year's resolutions ever since I was nine. Every year on Christmas, I'd sit down at the kitchen table under the dim yellow light, hunched over in a turtleneck sweater because of the draft from the glass door to the deck, and I'd write my goals for the year in a plain black journal I'd bought for myself. And every year on Christmas Eve, I'd sit down in the exact same place and open the exact same book to a new page and write down what I'd accomplished in the previous twelve months. Every year, the two lists looked identical.

Last Christmas, though, I hadn't made any resolutions. I'd spent the month trying not to look through the glass door at the woods, trying not to think about the wolves and Sam. Sitting at the kitchen table and planning for the future had seemed like a cruel pretense more than anything else.

But now that I had Sam and a new year, that black journal, shelved neatly next to my career books and memoirs, haunted
me. I had dreams about sitting at the kitchen table in a turtleneck sweater, dreams where I kept on writing and writing my resolutions without ever filling the page.

Today, waiting for Sam to get home, I couldn't stand it anymore. I got the journal from my shelf and headed for the kitchen. Before I sat down, I took two more ibuprofen; the two the school nurse had given me had pretty much killed the headache I'd had earlier, but I wanted to make sure it didn't make a reappearance. I had just clicked on the flower-shaped light over the table and sharpened my pencil when the phone rang. I stood and leaned over the counter to reach it.

“Hello?”

“Grace, hi.” It took me a moment to realize that it was my father's voice. I was unused to hearing it, pressed and fuzzy, over the phone lines.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“What? No. Nothing's wrong. I was just calling to let you know that your mother and I will be home around nine from Pat and Tina's.”

“Okaay,”
I said. I already knew this; Mom had told me this morning when we parted ways, me to school, her to the studio.

A pause. “Are you alone?”

So
that's
what this call was about. For some reason, the question made my throat tighten. “No,” I said. “Elvis is here. Would you like to talk to him?”

Dad acted as if I hadn't answered. “Is Sam there?”

I felt like answering yes, just to see what he would say, but instead, I told him the truth, my voice coming out strange and defensive. “No. I'm just doing homework.”

While Mom and Dad knew Sam was my boyfriend — Sam and I had made no secret of our relationship — they still didn't know what was really going on. All the nights Sam stayed over, they thought I was sleeping alone. They had no idea about my hopes for our future. They thought it was a simple, innocent, bound-to-end teenage relationship. It wasn't that I didn't want them to know. Just that their obliviousness had its advantages, too, for now.

“Okay,” Dad said. There was an unspoken commendation in his answer, an approval of me being alone with my homework. This is what Graces did in the evening, and heaven forbid I should break the mold. “Planning a quiet night?”

I heard the front door open and Sam's step in the hall. “Yes,” I replied as he walked into the living room, guitar case in hand.

“Good. Well, see you later on,” Dad said. “Happy studying.”

We hung up at the same time. I watched Sam silently shed his coat and go straight for the study.

“Hi, bucko,” I said when he returned holding his guitar minus the case. He smiled at me, but the skin around his eyes was tight. “You seem tense.”

He crashed down onto the sofa, only half sitting, and threw his fingers across the strings of the guitar. A discordant chord rang out. “Isabel came into the store today,” he said.

“Really? What did she want?”

“Just some books. And to tell me that she'd seen wolves by her house.”

My mind instantly slid to her father and to the wolf hunt he'd led in the woods behind my house. From Sam's troubled expression, I knew his thoughts mirrored mine. “That's not good.”

“No,” he said. His fingers moved restlessly over the guitar strings, effortlessly and instinctively picking out some beautiful minor chord. “Neither was the cop that came in.”

I set my pencil down and leaned across the table toward him. “
What?
What did a cop want?”

He hesitated. “Olivia. He wanted to know if I thought she might be living in the woods.”

“What?” I asked again, my skin prickling. There was no way that someone could guess that. No way. “How could he know?”

“He didn't think she was a wolf, obviously, but I think he was hoping we were hiding her or that she was living nearby and we were helping her or something. I said she didn't strike me as the outdoorsy type, and he thanked me and left.”

“Wow.” I leaned back in my chair and considered. It was really only surprising that they hadn't questioned Sam sooner. They'd already talked to me soon after Olivia “ran away,” and had probably only just recently made the connection between Sam and me. I shrugged. “They're just being thorough. I don't think there's anything for us to worry about. I mean, she reappears when she reappears, right? How long do you think it will be until the new wolves start to change back into humans?”

Sam didn't reply right away. “They won't stay human at first. They'll be really unstable. It depends how warm the day is. It varies from person to person, too, sometimes a lot. It's like how on certain days some people wear sweaters when other people can wear T-shirts and still feel comfortable — different reactions to the same temperature. But I guess it's possible some might have already shifted into humans once this year.”

I imagined Olivia darting through the woods in her new wolf body, before pulling my mind back to what Sam was saying. “Really? Already? So someone might have seen her?”

Sam shook his head. “She'll only have a few minutes as a human in this weather; I really doubt anyone could've seen her. It's just … it's just a practice run for later.” He was lost to me then, his eyes someplace far away. Maybe remembering what it was like for him back when he was a new wolf. I inadvertently shuddered; thinking about Sam and his parents always got to me. A nasty chill clenched in my stomach until Sam went back to playing his guitar. For several long minutes, he walked his fingers up and down chords, and when it became obvious that he was done speaking for the moment, I dropped my gaze back to my resolutions. My mind wasn't really on them, though; it was circling the idea of young Sam shifting back and forth while his parents looked on in horror. I doodled a 3-D rectangle on the corner of the page.

Finally, Sam said, “What are you doing? It looks suspiciously creative.”

“Slightly creative,” I said. I looked at him, eyebrow raised, until he smiled. Strumming a chord, he sang,
“Has Grace quitted herself of numbers / and given herself to words?”

“That doesn't even rhyme.”

“Abandoned all her algebra / and taken to penning verbs?”
Sam finished.

I made a face at him. “
Words
and
verbs
don't really rhyme. I'm writing my New Year's resolutions.”

“They
do
rhyme,” he insisted. Bringing his guitar over to
the table and sitting across from me — the guitar made a low, musical
thump
as it lightly struck the edge of the table — he added, “I'm going to watch. I've never written any resolutions before. I'd like to see what organization in progress looks like.”

He drew the open journal across the table toward him, his eyebrows tipping low over his eyes. “What's this?” he asked. “Resolution number three:
Choose a college
. You've already picked a
college
?”

I slid the journal back to my side of the table and turned quickly to a blank page. “I did not. I got distracted by this cute boy who turned into a wolf. This is the first year I haven't made all of my resolutions, and it's all your fault. I need to get back on track.”

Smile slightly faded, Sam scraped his chair back and rested his guitar against the wall. From the countertop next to the phone he got a pen and an index card. “Okay, then. Let's make new ones.”

I wrote
Get a job
. He wrote
Keep loving my job
. I wrote
Stay madly in love
. He wrote
Stay human
.

“Because I'll always be madly in love,” he said, looking at his index card instead of my face.

I kept looking at him, his eyes hidden behind his lashes, until he lifted them back up to me.

“So are you going to put
Pick a college
on there again?” he asked.

“Are you?” I asked back, keeping my voice light. The question felt loaded — we were edging into the first conversation that really addressed what life would look like this side of winter, now that Sam could live a real life. The closest college to
Mercy Falls was in Duluth, an hour away, and all of my other, pre-Sam choices were even farther.

“I asked first.”

“Sure,” I said, sounding glib rather than carefree. I scribbled down
Pick a college
in a hand that looked completely different from the rest of my list. “Now, are you?” My heart was unexpectedly thrumming with something like panic.

But instead of answering, Sam stood and went to the kitchen. I swiveled to watch him put on the teakettle. He brought down two mugs from the cabinet over the stove; for some reason, the familiarity of this easy movement filled me with affection. I fought the urge to go stand behind him and wrap my arms around his chest.

“Beck wanted me to go to law school,” Sam said, fingering the edge of my favorite robin's-egg-blue mug. “He never told me, but I heard him tell Ulrik.”

“It's hard to imagine you as a lawyer,” I said.

Sam smiled a self-deprecating smile and shook his head. “I can't imagine myself as a lawyer, either. I can't imagine myself as anything yet, to tell you the truth. I know that sounds … terrible. Like I have no ambition.” Again, his eyebrows drew together, pensive. “But this idea of a future is really new to me. Until this month, I never thought I could go to college. I don't want to rush into it.”

I must have been just staring at him, because he added, hurriedly, “But I don't want you to have to wait, Grace. I don't want to keep you from going ahead because I can't make up my mind.”

Feeling childish, I said, “We could go someplace together.”

The kettle whistled. Sam pulled it from the heat as he said, “I somehow doubt that the same college will be ideal for a budding math genius and a boy in love with moody poetry. I suppose it's possible.” He stared out the kitchen window at the frozen gray woods. “I don't know if I can really leave, though. At all. Who will take care of the pack?”

“I thought that was why the new wolves were made,” I said. The words sounded strange in my mouth. Callous. As if the pack dynamic were an artificial, engineered thing, which of course it wasn't. Nobody knew what the newcomers were like. Nobody but Beck, of course, but he wasn't talking.

Sam rubbed his forehead, pressing his palm over his eyes; he did it a lot since he'd come back. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I know that's what they're for.”

“He would've wanted you to go,” I said. “And I still think we could find a school together.”

Sam looked at me, his fingers still pressed into his temple as if he'd forgotten they were there. “I'd like that.” He paused. “I'd really like — I'd like to meet the new wolves and see what kind of people they are, though. It'll make me feel better. Maybe I'll go after that. After I'm sure everything's taken care of here.”

I put a jagged line through
Pick a college
. “I'll wait for you,” I said.

“Not forever,” Sam said.

“No, if you turn out to be useless, I'll go without you.” I tapped my pencil on my teeth. “I think we should look around for the new wolves tomorrow. And Olivia. I'll call Isabel and ask her about the wolves she saw in her woods.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Sam said. He returned to his list at the table and added something to it. Then he smiled at me and spun the index card so that I could read it right side up.

Listen to Grace.

• SAM •

Later, I thought of the things I could have added to the list of resolutions, things I'd wanted back before I realized what being a wolf meant for my future. Things like
Write a novel
and
Find a band
and
Get a degree in obscure poetry in translation
and
Travel the world
. It felt indulgent and fanciful to be considering those things now after reminding myself for so long that they were impossible.

I tried to imagine myself filling out a college application. Writing a synopsis. Tacking a sign saying
DRUMMERS WANTED
on the corkboard opposite Beck's post office box. The words danced in my head, dazzling in their sudden nearness. I wanted to add them to my index card of resolutions, but I just … couldn't.

That night, while Grace showered, I got out the card and looked at it again. And I wrote:

Believe in my cure.