Linger (24 page)

• SAM •

Without Grace, I was a nocturnal animal. I stalked ants in the kitchen, waiting by the insufficient light of the recessed bulbs with a glass and a piece of paper so that I could transport them outside. I took Paul's dusty guitar from its perch by the mantel and tuned it. First properly, then to drop D, then to DADGAD, then back to proper. In the basement, I browsed Beck's nonfiction until I found a book on taxes and another on winning friends and influencing people and another on meditation. I stacked them into a cairn of books I never intended to read. Upstairs, in my bathroom, I sat on the tile and experimented with the right way to trim my toenails. Cupping my fingers beneath my feet only caught the flying nails half the time, and if I left them to fly where they would, I could only find half the nails on the white tile. So it was a losing battle, with fifty percent casualties either way.

Partway through the process, I heard the wolves begin to howl, loud through Beck's bedroom window. Their songs sounded different from night to night, depending on how I felt.
They could be sonorous, beautiful, a heavenly choir in heavy, wood-scented pelts. Or an eerie, lonely symphony, notes falling against one another into the night. Joyful, voices lifted, calling down the moon.

Tonight, they were a cacophonous mob, howls vying for attention, barks interspersed. Restless. A pack discordant. A pack dispersed. They usually howled like that on nights when either Beck or Paul was human, but tonight they had both their leaders. I was the only one missing.

I stood up, cold floorboards pressing up against the soles of my human feet, and went to the window. I hesitated for a moment, then flicked the lock and threw open the window. Frigid night air rushed in, but it didn't do anything to me. I was just human. Just me.

The wolves' howls poured in as well, surrounding me.

Do you miss me?

The disorganized cries continued, more protest than song.

I miss you guys.

And, with dull surprise, I realized that was all there was to it. I missed them. I didn't miss
it
. This — this person leaning on the sash, full of human memories and fears and hopes, this person who would grow old — was who I was, and I didn't want to lose that. I didn't miss standing amongst them, howling. It would never compare to the feel of my fingers on the strings of my guitar. Their poignant song could never be as triumphant as the sound of me saying Grace's name.

“Some of us are trying to sleep!” I shouted out into the darkness, which swallowed the lie.

The night went quiet. The darkness was frozen into silence; no birdcalls or rustling of leaves in this still, still night. Just the distant hiss of tires on a far-off road.

“Roooooooooooo!”
I called out the window, feeling clownish as I prompted my pack.

A pause. Long enough that I realized how badly I wanted for them to need me.

Then they began to howl again, just as loud as before, their voices spilling over one another with new purpose.

I grinned.

A familiar voice behind me made me jerk; I caught myself just before I put a hand through the screen.

“I thought you were supposed to have animal cunning and the ability to hear a pin drop a mile away.”

Grace. Grace's voice.

When I turned, she was standing in the doorway, a backpack slung on her shoulder. Her smile was … shy.

“And here I am, sneaking up on you while you — what were you doing, anyway?”

I pushed down the window and turned back around, blinking. Grace was standing here in the doorway to Beck's bedroom. Grace, who was supposed to be home in her own bed. Grace, who haunted my thoughts when I couldn't dream. I felt like I couldn't be surprised. Hadn't I known all along that she'd appear here? Hadn't I just been waiting to find her in my doorway?

I finally regained control of my muscles and crossed the room to her. I was close enough to kiss her, but instead I reached
for the dangling, loose strap of her backpack and ran my thumb along its ridged surface. The backpack's presence answered one of my unasked questions. Another question was answered by the still-lingering wolf scent on her breath. And the host of other questions I wanted to ask —
Do you know what will happen when they find out? Do you know this will change everything? Are you all right with how they will see you? How they will see me?
— had already been answered “yes” by Grace, or she wouldn't be here. She wouldn't have set a foot outside her bedroom door without thinking through everything.

Which meant I only had one question to ask: “Are you sure?”

Grace nodded.

And just like that, everything changed.

I tugged the backpack strap gently and sighed. “Oh, Grace.”

“Are you mad?”

I took her hands and rocked them back and forth, dancing without lifting a foot. My head was a jumble of Rilke —
“You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start”
— her father's voice —
I'm trying really hard to not say something I'll regret later
— and longing personified, a physical being here, finally, in my wanting hands.

“I'm scared,” I said.

But I felt a smile on my face. And when she saw my smile, an anxious cloud that I hadn't even noticed on her face sailed away, leaving only clear skies and finally, the sun.

“Hi,” I said, and I hugged her. I missed her more now that I actually had her in my arms than when I hadn't.

• GRACE •

I felt hazy and slow, moving in a dream.

This was someone else's life, where the girl ran away to her boyfriend's house. This wasn't reliable Grace, who never turned in homework late or stayed out partying or colored outside the lines. And yet, here I was, in this rebellious girl's body, carefully laying my toothbrush beside Sam's brand-new red one like I belonged here. Like I was going to be here a while. My eyes ached from fatigue, but my brain kept
whirring
, wide awake.

The pain was quieter now, calmed. I knew it was just hiding, pushed away by the knowledge that Sam was near, but I was glad of the respite.

On the bathroom floor, I saw a little half-moon of a toenail lying on the tile next to the base of the toilet. Its utter normalcy sort of drove home, with utter finality, that I was standing in Sam's bathroom in Sam's house and I was planning on spending the night in Sam's bedroom with Sam.

My parents would kill me. What would they do first, in the morning? Call my cell phone? Hear it ringing wherever they'd hidden it? They could call the police, if they wanted to. Like my dad said, I was still under eighteen. I closed my eyes, imagining Officer Koenig knocking on the door, my parents standing behind him, waiting to drag me back home. My stomach turned over.

Sam softly knocked on the open bathroom door. “You okay?”

I opened my eyes and looked at him standing in the doorway. He had changed into some sweats, and a T-shirt with an octopus printed on it. Maybe this was a good idea after all.

“I'm okay.”

“You look cute in your pajamas,” he told me, his voice hesitant as if he were admitting something he hadn't meant to.

I reached out and put a hand on his chest, feeling the rise and fall through the thin fabric. “You do, too.”

Sam made a little rueful shape with his mouth and then peeled my hand from his chest. Using it to steer me, he switched off the bathroom light and led me down the hall, his bare feet padding on the floorboards.

His bedroom was illuminated only by the hall light and the ambient glow from the porch light through the window; I could just barely see the white shape of the blanket tidily turned down on the bed. Releasing my hand, Sam said, “I'll turn off the hall light once you're in, so you don't smack into anything.”

He ducked his face away from me then, looking shy, and I sort of knew how he felt. It was like we were just meeting each other again for the first time, like we'd never kissed or spent the night together. Everything felt brand-new and shiny and terrifying.

I crept into the bed, the sheets cool under my hands as I edged toward the side of the mattress that met the wall. The hall went dark and I heard Sam sigh — a weighty, shaky sigh — before I heard the floorboards creak with his steps. The room was just light enough for me to see the edge of his shoulders as he climbed into the bed with me.

For a moment, we lay there, not touching, two strangers, and then Sam rolled toward me so that his head was on the same pillow as mine.

When he kissed me, his lips soft and careful, it was all the thrill of our first kiss and all the practiced familiarity of the accumulated memory of all our kisses. I could feel the beat of his heart through his T-shirt, a rapid
thud
that sped even more when I twined our legs together.

“I don't know what will happen,” he said softly. His face was right next to my neck, his words spoken right into my skin.

“I don't, either,” I said. Nerves and the thing inside me twisted my stomach.

Outside, the wolves still intermittently sang, their cries rising and falling, hard to hear now. Sam, beside me, was very still. “Do you miss it?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, so fast that I couldn't believe he'd actually considered my question. After a moment, he gave me the rest of his answer, stumbling and hesitant. “This is what I want. I want to be me. I want to know what I'm doing. I want to remember. I want to matter.”

He was wrong, though. He had always mattered, even when he was a wolf in the woods behind my house.

I turned my face quickly, to wipe my nose on a tissue I'd brought with me from the bathroom. I didn't have to look at it to know that it would be dotted with red.

Sam took a deep breath and wrapped his arms around me. He buried his head in my shoulder, and I felt him take handfuls of my pajama top in his fists as he breathed in my scent. “Stay with me, Grace,” he whispered, and I balled my shaking fists up against his chest. “Please stay with me.”

I could smell my own skin, the sick-sweet almond smell of me, and I knew he wasn't talking about just tonight.

• SAM •

• SAM •

The longest day of my life began and ended with Grace closing her eyes.

The next morning I awoke with Grace not quite in my arms, but rather sprawled indelicately across me and my pillow, pinning me to the bed. Sunlight framed both of us; the rectangle square of sun from the window bordered our bodies perfectly. The day had gotten late while we slept it away. It seemed like forever since I had slept like that, dead to the world, unmindful of the sunlight. Propping myself up on one elbow, I had a weird, falling sensation, the weight of thousands of unlived days stacked upon one another as I looked down at Grace. She mumbled as she awoke. When she turned her face toward me, I saw a flash of red before she ran her arm across her face.

“Ew,”
she said, opening her eyes to look at her wrist.

“Do you need a tissue?” I asked.

Grace groaned. “I'll get it.”

“That's okay,” I said. “I'm already up.”

“You are not.”

“I am. See, I'm leaning on my elbow. That is one thousand
times more up than you.” Normally at this point I would've leaned in for a kiss or to tickle her or to run my hand down her thigh or to rest my head on her stomach, but today, I was afraid of breaking her.

Grace looked at me as if the lack of contact was conspicuous. “I could just wipe my nose on your shirt.”

“Point taken!” I said, and slid out of bed to get a tissue. When I came back, her hair was mussed and hung down around her face, hiding her expression. Without comment, she wiped her arm, balling the tissue up quickly, but not quickly enough for me to miss the blood on it.

I felt wound tight.

Handing her a wad of tissues, I said, “I think we should take you to the doctor.”

“Doctors are useless,” Grace said. She dabbed at her nose, but there was nothing there anymore. She wiped off her arm instead.

“I want to go anyway,” I said. Something had to put to rest this anxiety inside my chest.

“I hate doctors.”

“I know,” I said. This was true. Grace had waxed poetic about this before; personally, I thought it had more to do with her aversion to wasting time than it did to any fear or disdain of those in the medical profession. I thought what she really had was an aversion to waiting rooms. “We'll go to the health center. They're fast.”

Grace made a face, then shrugged an agreement. “Okay.”

“Thank you,” I said, relieved as she
thumped
back down onto a pillow.

Grace closed her eyes. “I don't think they'll find anything.”

I thought she was probably right. But what else could I do?

• GRACE •

Part of me wanted to go to the doctor, in case they could help. But more of me was afraid to, in case they couldn't. What option was left if this failed?

Being in the health center added to the surreal aspect of the day. I'd never been, though Sam seemed familiar enough with it. The walls were a putrid shade of sea green and the exam room had a mural featuring four misshapen killer whales frolicking in sea green waves. All the while the nurse and the doctor were questioning me, Sam kept putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out. When I shot him a look, he quit doing it for a few minutes, then started cracking his knuckles with his thumb instead.

My head was swimmy, which I told the doctor, and my nose obligingly demonstrated its bleeding for the nurse. I could only describe my stomachache, however, and both of them looked mystified when I tried to get them to smell my skin (the doctor, however, did).

Ninety-five minutes after we'd entered, I left with a prescription for a seasonal allergy medication, a recommendation to get an over-the-counter iron supplement and saline nose spray, and the memory of a lecture on teens and sleep deprivation. Oh, and Sam was sixty dollars poorer.

“Do you feel better?” I asked Sam as he opened the door to the Volkswagen for me. He was a hunched bird in this spring
weather, black and stark against the gray clouds. It was impossible to tell from the occluded sky if it was the beginning of the day or the end of one.

“Yes,” he said. He was still a terrible liar.

“Good,” I said. I was still a fantastic one.

And the thing inside my muscles groaned and stretched and ached.

Sam took me for a coffee, which I did not drink, and while we sat in Kenny's, Sam's cell phone rang. Sam tipped the phone toward me so I could see Rachel's number.

Leaning back, he handed me the phone. He had his arm curled around the back of my neck in a way that was very uncomfortable but very charming, so I couldn't move. I leaned my cheek against his arm and flipped the phone open.

“Hello?”

“Grace, oh my God, are you totally crazy?”

My stomach twisted. “You must've talked to my parents.”

“They called my house. Probably the Tundra Queen's as well. They wanted to know if you were with me, because
apparently you did not spend last night in your bed
, and you were not near your phone today, and they were growing slightly concerned, in a way that is very disturbing for Rachel to be involved in!”

I pressed my hand into my forehead and leaned my elbow on the table. Sam politely pretended not to listen, though Rachel's voice was clearly audible. “I'm sorry, Rachel. What did you tell them?”

“You know I'm not a good liar, Grace! I couldn't tell them you were at my house!”

“I know,” I said.

Rachel said, “So I told them you were at Isabel's.”

I blinked. “You
did
?”

“What else was I supposed to do? Tell them you were at The Boy's, and have them kill both of you?”

My voice came out sounding a bit more pugnacious than I intended. “They're going to find out eventually.”

“What do you mean? Grace Brisbane, you do not mean that you're not going back home again. Tell me that this was just because you were momentarily angry at them for grounding you. Or even tell me it's because you could not live without The Boy's stunning Boyfruits for another night. But don't tell me you think it's forever!”

Sam's face was twisted into a weird shape at the mention of his Boyfruits. I told Rachel, “I don't know. I hadn't thought that far ahead. But no, I don't really feel like going back anytime soon. Mom helpfully told me she thought that me and Sam were just a fling and that I needed to learn the difference between love and lust. And last night, Dad told me I wasn't allowed to see him until I was eighteen.”

Sam looked stricken. I hadn't told him that part.

“Wow. Again, the limited understanding of parental types never fails to surprise me. Especially because The Boy is … well, The Boy is clearly incredible, so what is their problem? But, anyway, what should I do? Are you going to … um. Yeah, what's going to happen?”

“Eventually I'll get tired of wearing the same two shirts over and over, and I'll have to go home and confront them,” I said. “But until then, I guess … I guess I'm not talking to them.” It
felt weird to say it. Yes, I was furious at them for what they'd said. But even I knew that those things weren't really worthy, on their own, of running away. It was more like they were the tip of the iceberg, and I wasn't so much running away as making their emotional distance from me official. They had seen no less of me today than they had most other days of my teen years.

“Wow,” Rachel said. You knew she was nonplussed when that was all she could say.

“I'm just done,” I said, and I was surprised to hear my voice waver, just a little. I hoped Sam hadn't caught it; I made sure my voice was firm when I said, “I'm not pretending we're a happy family anymore. I'm taking care of myself for once.”

It seemed suddenly profound, this moment, sitting in a faded little booth in Kenny's, the napkin holder on the table reflecting an image of Sam leaning against me, and me feeling like an island floating farther and farther from shore. I could feel my brain taking a picture of this scene, the washed-out lighting, the chipped edge of the plates, the still-full coffee mug in front of me, the neutral colors of the layered T's Sam wore.

“Wow,” Rachel said again. She paused, for a long moment. “Grace, if you're really serious about this … be careful, okay? I mean … don't hurt The Boy. It just seems like this is the kind of war that leaves lots of bodies behind and leaves the villages of the surrounding areas exhausted and war-weary from all the pillaging.”

“Believe me,” I said, “The Boy is the one thing in all this that I'm determined to keep.”

Rachel breathed out a huge sigh. “Okay. You know I'll do whatever you need me to do. You probably ought to touch base
with she-of-the-pointy-boots to make sure that she knows what's going on.”

“Thanks,” I said, and Sam leaned his head on my shoulder as if he were suddenly as exhausted as I was. “I'll see you tomorrow, okay?”

Rachel agreed and hung up. I slid the phone back into the pocket of Sam's cargo pants before resting my head against his head. I closed my eyes, and for a moment I just let myself inhale the scent of his hair and pretend that we were already back at Beck's house. I just wanted to be able to curl up with him and sleep without having to worry about confronting my parents or Cole or the odor of almonds and wolf that was starting to blossom on my skin again.

“Wake up,” Sam said.

“I'm not sleeping,” I replied.

Sam just looked at me. Then he looked at my coffee. “You didn't drink any of your liquid energy, Grace.” He didn't wait for my answer; he simply took some bills out of his wallet and slid them underneath his own empty mug. He looked tired and older, dark circles beneath his eyes, and suddenly I was suffused with guilt. I was making things so hard on him.

My skin felt weird and tingly; I tasted copper again.

“Let's go home.” I said.

Sam didn't ask me which home I meant. The word meant only one place now.