Linger (9 page)

• SAM •

Something woke me.

Surrounded by the dull, familiar darkness of Grace's bedroom, I wasn't sure what it was. There was no sound outside, and the rest of the house lay in the half-aware silence of night. Grace, too, was quiet, rolled away from me. I wrapped my arms around her, pressing my nose against the back of her soap-scented neck. The tiny blond hairs at her nape tickled my nostrils. I jerked my face away from them and Grace sighed in her sleep, curling her back tighter against the shape of my body as she did. I should've slept, too — I had inventory work at the store early the next day — but something in my subconscious hummed with an uneasy watchfulness. So I lay against her, close as two spoons in a drawer, until her skin was too hot to be comfortable.

I slid a few inches away, keeping a hand on her side. Normally, the soft up-and-down of her ribs under my palm lulled me to sleep when nothing else would. But not tonight.

Tonight, I couldn't stop remembering what it had felt like when I'd been just about to shift. The way the cold had crawled
along my skin, trailing goose bumps behind it. The turn, turn, turn of my stomach, aching nausea unfurling. The slow sun-burst of pain up my spine as it stretched according to memories of another shape. My thoughts slipping away from me, crushed and reformed to fit my winter skull.

Sleep evaded me, just out of my grasp. My instincts prickled relentlessly, urging me to alertness. The darkness pressed against my eyes while the wolf inside me sang
something is not right
.

Outside, the wolves began to howl.

• GRACE •

I was too hot. The sheets stuck to my damp calves; I tasted sweat at the corner of my lips. As the wolves howled, my skin tingled with the heat, a hundred tiny needle pricks all over my face and hands. Everything felt painful: the blanket's uncomfortable weight on me, Sam's cold hand on my hip, the wailing, high cries of the wolves outside, the memory of Sam's fingers pressed into his temples, the shape of my skin on my body.

I was asleep; I was dreaming. Or I was awake, coming out of a dream. I couldn't decide.

In my mind, I saw all the people I'd ever seen shift into wolves: Sam, mournful and agonized, Beck, strong and controlled, Jack, savage and painful, Olivia, swift and easy. They all observed me from the woods, dozens of eyes watching me: the outsider, the one who didn't change.

My tongue stuck to the roof of my sandpaper mouth. I wanted to lift my face from my damp pillow, but it felt like too
much trouble. I waited restlessly for sleep, but my eyes hurt too much to close.

If I hadn't been cured, I wondered, what would my shift have been like? What sort of wolf would I have been? Looking at my hands, I imagined them dark gray, banded with white and black. I felt the weight of a ruff hanging on my shoulders, felt the nausea kick in my gut.

For a single, brilliant moment, I felt nothing but the cold air of my room on my skin and heard nothing but Sam breathing beside me. But then the wolves began to howl again, and my body shuddered with a sensation that was both new and somehow familiar.

I was going to shift.

I choked on the wolf rising up inside me, pressing against the lining of my stomach, clawing inside my skin, trying to peel me inside out.

I wanted it, and my muscles burned and groaned.

Pain split me

I had no voice

I was on fire.

I sprang from the bed, shaking off my skin.

• SAM •

I jerked awake, stung by Grace's scream. She was one hundred million degrees, close enough to burn me but too far away for me to reach.

“Grace!” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

The sheets swept off my body as she rolled away from me,
crying out again. In the dim light, I could only see her shoulder, and I reached out for it, cupping her arm with my hand. She was drenched with sweat, and her skin trembled beneath my palm, an unstable, unfamiliar flutter.

“Grace, wake up! Are you okay?” My heart was pounding so loud that it felt like I wouldn't hear her even if she did answer.

She thrashed beneath my touch and then bolted upright, eyes wild, body volatile and quivering. I didn't know her.

“Grace, talk to me,” I whispered, though whispering seemed pointless in light of her earlier scream.

Grace stared at her hands with a kind of wonder. I laid the back of my hand on her forehead; she was appallingly hot, hotter than I thought anyone could be. I laid my palms on both sides of her neck, and she shuddered as if they were ice.

“I think you're sick,” I said, my own stomach turning over. “You have a fever.”

She spread her fingers wide and studied her shaking hands. “I dreamed — I dreamed I shifted. I thought I —”

She suddenly let out a terrible wail and curled away from me, clutching her arms around her stomach.

I didn't know what to do.

“What's wrong?” I asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. “I'm getting you some Tylenol or something. In the bathroom?”

She just whimpered. It was terrifying.

I leaned forward to see her face, and that's when I smelled it.

She stank of wolf.

Wolf, wolf, wolf.

From Grace.

The scent of wolf.

It wasn't possible. It had to be me. I prayed it was me.

I turned my face into my own shoulder, inhaled. Lifted my hand to my nose, the one that had just touched her forehead.

Wolf.

My heart stopped.

And then the door came open and light flooded in from the hall.

“Grace?” Her father's voice. The bedroom light came on, and his eyes found me sitting next to her.
“Sam?”

• GRACE •

I didn't even see Dad come into the room. The first moment I realized he was there was when I heard his voice, far away, like sound through water.

“What's going on here?”

Sam's voice was a murmured soundtrack to the pain that burned through me. I hugged my pillow and stared at the wall. I could see the diffuse shadow that Sam made and the sharper one of my father, closer to the hall lights. I watched them move back and forth, making one big shape and then two again.

“Grace.
Grace Brisbane
.” My father's voice became louder again. “Don't pretend I'm not here.”

“Mr. Brisbane —” Sam started.

“Do not —
do not
— ‘Mr. Brisbane' me,” Dad snapped. “I can't believe you can look me in the face, when behind our backs —”

I didn't want to move because every movement made the fire inside me burn faster, but I couldn't let him say that. I rolled toward them, wincing at the thorns of pain that prickled through
my stomach as I did. “Dad. No. Don't say that to Sam. You don't know.”

“Don't think I'm not furious with you, too!” Dad said. “You have completely, utterly betrayed our trust in you.”

“Please,” Sam said, and now I saw that he was standing by the side of the bed in his sweatpants and T-shirt, fingers making white marks in his own arms. “I know you're angry with me, and you can keep being angry with me and I don't blame you, but there's something wrong with Grace.”

“What's going on here?” Now Mom's voice. Then, in a strange, disappointed tone that I knew would kill Sam, “Sam? I can't believe it.”

“Please, Mrs. Brisbane,” Sam said, although Mom had told him before to call her Amy, and he normally did, “Grace is really, really warm. She —”

“Just get away from the bed. Where's your car?” Dad's voice fell into the background again, and I stared at the shape of the ceiling fan above me, imagining it coming on and drying the sweat on my forehead.

Mom's face appeared in front of me, and I felt her lay her hand on my forehead. “Sweetie, you do seem feverish. We heard you cry out.”

“My stomach,” I murmured, careful not to open my mouth too wide, in case what was inside me crawled out.

“I'm going to try to find the thermometer.” She vanished from my sight. I heard Dad's and Sam's voices going on and on and on. I didn't know what they could possibly have to talk about. Mom reappeared. “Try to sit up, Grace.”

I cried out as I did, claws scraping the inside of my skin. Mom handed me a glass of water while she peered at the thermometer.

Sam, standing by the bedroom door, jerked around when the glass slid from my unprotesting hand and landed on the floor with a dull and distant sound. Mom stared at the glass, and then at me.

My fingers still in a circle, cupping an invisible glass, I whispered, “Mom, I think I'm really sick.”

“That's it,” Dad said. “Sam, get your coat. I'm taking you to your car. Amy, take her temperature. I'll be back in a few minutes. I'll have my phone.”

I turned my eyes toward Sam, and his expression pierced me. He said, “Please don't ask me to leave her like this.” My breath came a little faster.

“I'm not asking,” my father said. “I'm telling. If you
ever
want to be allowed to see my daughter again, you will get out of my house right now, because I am telling you to.”

Sam scrubbed his hands through his hair and then linked them behind his head, eyes closed. For a moment, it was like we all held our breaths, waiting to see what he would do. The tension in his body was written so clearly that an explosion seemed imminent.

He opened his eyes, and when he spoke, I almost didn't recognize his voice. “Don't — don't even
say
that. Don't threaten me with that. I'll go. But don't —” And he couldn't even say anything else. I saw him swallow, and I think I said his name, but he was already down the hall with my father following him.

A moment later, I thought I heard the engine of Dad's car rev to life outside, but it was Mom's car, and I was in it, and I felt like my fever was eating me alive. Outside the car window, the stars swam in the cold night sky above me as we drove, and I felt small and alone and in pain.
Sam Sam Sam Sam where are you?

“Sweetie,” Mom said from the driver's seat. “Sam's not here.”

I swallowed tears and watched the stars wheel out of sight.

• SAM •

The night that Grace went to the hospital without me was the night I finally turned my eyes back to the wolves.

It was a night full of tiny coincidences that collided into something bigger. If Grace hadn't gotten sick that night, if her parents had been out late as they usually were, if they hadn't discovered us, if I hadn't gone back to Beck's house, if Isabel hadn't heard Cole outside her back door, if she hadn't delivered Cole to me, if Cole hadn't been equal parts junkie and asshole and genius — how would life have unfolded?

Rilke says:
“Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben”
—
“We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.”

My hand already missed the weight of Grace's.

Nothing was the same after that night. Nothing.

 

After I got into the car with Grace's father, he drove me to the cluttered alley behind the bookstore where my Volkswagen was parked, navigating carefully so that he didn't rub his mirrors on the trash bins on either side. He pulled to a stop just behind
my car, his silent face illuminated by the flickering streetlight that hung from the second story of the store. I was silent, too, my mouth sealed shut with a toxic paste of guilt and anger. We sat there together, and the windshield wiper scraped suddenly across the windshield, making us both flinch. He had accidentally turned it to intermittent when he signaled to enter the alley. He let it swipe the already-clear windshield once more before he seemed to remember to turn it off.

Finally, without looking at me, he said, “Grace has always been perfect. In seventeen years, she has never gotten into trouble at school. She's never done drugs or alcohol. She's a straight-A student. She has always been absolutely perfect.”

I didn't say anything.

He went on. “Until now. We don't need someone to come along and corrupt her. I don't know you, Samuel, but I do know my daughter. And I know that this is all you. I am not trying to be threatening here, but I won't have you ruining my daughter. I think you seriously need to reconsider your priorities before you see her again.”

For a brief moment, I tried out words in my head, but everything I thought of was too vitriolic or honest for me to imagine saying. So I just got out into the frigid night with everything still shut up inside me.

After he had gone, waiting just long enough to make sure that my car started before he backed out onto the empty street, I sat in the Volkswagen with my hands folded in my lap and stared at the back door of the bookstore. It seemed like days ago that Grace and I had walked through it, me still high with the memory of the studio invoice and her still high with my reaction
and the pleasure of knowing just what to get me. I couldn't picture her smug face now, though. The only image my mind could pull up was the one of her twisting in pain on top of the sheets, face flushed, reeking of wolf.

It's only a fever.

That's what I told myself as I drove toward Beck's, my headlights the only illumination in the pitch-black night, bending and flickering against the black tree trunks on either side of the road. Again and again I said it, even as my gut whispered that it wasn't and my hands ached to jerk the wheel and drive right back to the Brisbane house.

Halfway to Beck's, I took out my cell phone and dialed Grace's number. I knew it was a bad idea even as I did it, but I couldn't help it.

There was a pause, and then I heard her father's voice instead of hers.

“I'm only picking this up to tell you not to call,” he said. “Seriously, Samuel, if you know what's good for you, you will just leave it for tonight. I do not want to talk to you tonight. I do not want Grace talking to you. Just —”

“I want to know how she is.” I thought about adding
please
, but couldn't bring myself to.

There was a pause, like he was listening to someone else. Then he said, “It's just a fever. Don't call again. I'm trying really hard to not say something I'll regret later.” This time I did hear someone's voice in the background — Grace's or her mother's — and then the phone went dead.

I was a paper boat drifting in a massive night ocean.

I didn't want to go to Beck's, but I had nowhere else to go. I had no one else to go to. I was human, and without Grace, I had nothing but this car and a bookstore and a house full of countless empty rooms.

So I drove to Beck's — I needed to stop thinking of it as Beck's — and parked my car in the empty driveway. Once upon a time, I'd worked at the bookstore during the summers, when Beck was still human and I still lost my winters to being a wolf. I'd pull up in the summer evenings when it was still light, because during the summers, it was never night, and I would get out of Beck's car to the sounds of people laughing and the smell of the grill from the backyard. It felt strange to be stepping out into the still night now, the cold prickling my skin, and knowing that all those voices from my past were trapped in the woods. Everyone but me.

Grace.

Inside the house, I turned on the kitchen light, revealing the photographs stuck every which way all over the cabinets, and then switched on the hall light. In my head, I heard Beck say to my small nine-year-old self, “Why do we need every light in the house on? Are you signaling to aliens?”

And so I went through the house tonight and turned on every light, revealing a memory in every single room. The bathroom where I'd nearly turned into a wolf right after meeting Grace. The living room, where Paul and I had jammed with our guitars — his beat-up old Fender was still propped against the mantle. The downstairs guest room, where Derek had stayed with a girlfriend from town before Beck had chewed him out
for it. I turned on the lights to the basement stairs and the lights in the library down there, and then came back up to get the lights in Beck's office that I'd missed. In the living room, I stopped just long enough to crank up the expensive stereo system that Ulrik had bought when I was ten so that I could “hear Jethro Tull the way it was meant to be heard.”

Upstairs, I turned the knob on the floor lamp in Beck's room, where he had almost never slept, preferring to store books and papers on his bed and instead fall asleep in a chair in the basement, some book facedown on his chest. Shelby's room came to life under the dim yellow ceiling light, pristine and unlived in, no personal possessions except for her old computer. I was tempted for a brief moment to smash in the monitor, just because I wanted to hit something, and if anyone deserved it, Shelby did, but it didn't seem like there'd be any satisfaction in breaking it without her here to see me finally do it. Ulrik's room looked like it had been frozen in time. One of his jackets was still thrown across the bed next to a folded pair of jeans and an empty mug on the nightstand. Paul's room was next, where he had a mason jar on the dresser with two teeth in it — one belonging to him, and one belonging to a dead white dog.

I saved my own bedroom for last. Memories floated on strings from the ceiling. Books lined the walls, stacked and sloped against the desk. The room smelled stale and unused; the boy who had grown up in it hadn't stayed here for a long time.

I'd be staying in it now. One person rattling around in this house, waiting and hoping for the reappearance of the rest of his family.

But just before I reached inside the dark room for the light switch on the wall, I heard the sound of an engine outside.

I was no longer alone.

 

“Are you trying to land airplanes?” Isabel asked me. She didn't look real, standing in the middle of the living room in silky pajama bottoms and a padded white coat with a fur collar. I had never seen her without makeup, and she looked a lot younger. “I could see the house from a mile away. You must have every light turned on.”

I didn't reply. I was still trying to work out how Isabel had ended up here at four o'clock in the morning with the boy I'd last seen changing into a wolf in the middle of the kitchen floor. He stood there in a battered sweatshirt and jeans that hung on him like they belonged to someone else, his bare feet an alarming mottled shade, and his fingers hooked in his pockets as if their terrible swelling and discoloration didn't bother him. The way that he was looking at Isabel and the way she going out of her way
not
to look at him made it seem, impossibly, like they had some kind of history.

“You're frostbitten,” I said to the guy, because it was something to say that didn't require much thought. “You need to warm up those fingers or you're going to be very unhappy later. Isabel, you had to know that.”

“I'm not an idiot,” Isabel said. “But if my parents caught him in my house, he'd be dead, and that would make him even more unhappy. I decided the outside chance of them noticing my car missing in the middle of the night was a happier option.”
If Isabel noticed me swallowing, she didn't pause. “By the way, this is Sam.
The
Sam.” It took me a moment to realize that she was now talking to the cocky frostbitten guy.

The Sam.
I wondered what she'd told him about me. I looked at him. Again, the familiarity of his face pricked at me. It was not a
real
familiarity, like someone I had met in person, but more like the familiarity of meeting a person who looks like an actor whose name you can't recall.

“So you're the one in charge now?” he said, with a smile that struck me as sardonic. “I'm Cole.”

The one in charge now.
That's the way it was, wasn't it?

“Have you seen any of the other wolves change yet?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I thought it was too cold for
me
to be changing.”

His grotesquely colored fingers were bothering me enough that I moved away from him and Isabel, toward the kitchen, where I found a bottle of ibuprofen. I tossed it toward Isabel, who surprised me by catching it. “It's because you were just bitten. I mean, last year. Temperature doesn't have so much to do with you shifting yet. It's just going to be … unpredictable.”

“Unpredictable,” echoed Cole.

Sam, no, please, not again, stop
— I blinked, and my mother's voice was gone, back into the past where it belonged.

“What are these for? Him?” Isabel held up the bottle of pills and jerked her chin toward Cole. Again, I got that flash of
history
between them.

“Yeah. It's going to hurt like hell when he warms up his fingers,” I said. “That'll keep it bearable. Bathroom's that way.”

• ISABEL •

Cole took the ibuprofen from me, but I could tell he wasn't going to use it. Whether because he thought he was some macho tough guy or for religious reasons or what, I didn't know. But when he went into the downstairs bathroom, I heard him hit the light switch and set down the pill bottle without opening it. Then I heard the water begin to run into the bath. Sam turned away with this strange, disgusted look on his face, and I knew that he didn't like Cole.

“So, Romulus,” I said, and Sam turned around, his yellow eyes open wide. “Why are you here, all alone? I thought Grace would have to be surgically removed from your side.” After spending the last hour with Cole, whose face revealed only the emotions he wanted me to see, it was strange to see undisguised pain on Sam's face. His thick dark eyebrows showed misery all by themselves. It occurred to me that he and Grace might have had a fight.

“Her parents kicked me out,” Sam said, and he smiled for just a second, like people do when something's really not funny and they don't want to be telling you but they don't know what else to do. “Grace, uh, got sick and they, uh, found us together, and they kicked me out.”

“Tonight?”

He nodded, very broken and honest, and I couldn't quite look at him. “Yeah. I got here a little before you did.”

The fierce glow of every light in the house suddenly seemed more significant. I wasn't sure if I admired him for feeling everything so hard and fiercely, or if I was contemptuous of him for
having so much emotion that he had to spill it out every window of the house. I didn't know how I felt.

“But, um …” Sam said, and in just those two words, I heard him getting himself back together, like a horse assembling its legs beneath itself before standing up. “Anyway. Tell me about Cole. How did you end up with him?”

I looked at him sharply until I realized he meant
How did you end up
here
with him?
“Long story, wolf-boy,” I said, and crashed down on the sofa. “I couldn't sleep, and I heard him outside the house. It was pretty obvious what he was, and pretty obvious that he wasn't going to change back. I didn't want my parents to find out and freak, so, the end.”

Sam's mouth did something unreadable. “That's awfully nice of you.”

I smiled thinly. “It happens.”

“Does it?” Sam asked. “I think most people would've left a naked stranger outside.”

“I didn't want to step in a pile of his fingers tomorrow on my way to the car,” I said. I felt like Sam was probing me to say something else, like he'd somehow guessed that this was the second time that we'd met and that the first time had involved my tongue introducing itself to Cole's, and vice versa. I used the topic of Cole's fingers to redirect the conversation. “Speaking of which, I wonder how he's getting along in there.” I looked down the hallway toward the bathroom.

Sam hesitated. For some reason, I remembered that the light in the bathroom had been the only light not turned on. Finally, Sam said, “Why don't you go knock on the door and find out?
I'm going to go upstairs to get a room ready for him. I just — I need a minute to think.”

“Okay, whatever,” I said.