I saw Olivia after that, after I’d left her note on her parents’ car. She moved lightly in the twilight woods, her green eyes making her instantly identifiable. She was never alone; other wolves guided her, taught her, guarded her from the primitive dangers of the desolate winter wood.
I wanted to ask her if she’d seen him.
I think she wanted to tell me “no.”
Isabel called me a few days before Christmas break and my planned trip with Rachel. I didn’t know why she called me instead of just coming over to my new car; I could see her right across the school parking lot, sitting in her SUV by herself.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” I replied.
“Liar.” Isabel didn’t look at me. “You know he’s dead.”
It was easier to admit on the phone, rather than face-to-face. “I know.”
Across the frosty gray parking lot, Isabel snapped her phone shut. I heard her put her SUV in gear and then she drove it to where I stood by my car. There was a click as she unlocked the passenger-side door and a whirr as the window rolled down. “Get in. Let’s go somewhere.”
We went downtown and bought coffee, and then, because there was a parking place in front, we went to the bookstore. Isabel looked at the storefront for a long time before getting out of the car. We stood on the icy sidewalk and stared at the display window. It was all Christmas stuff. Reindeer and gingerbread and It’s a Wonderful Life.
“Jack loved Christmas,” Isabel said. “I think it’s a stupid holiday. I’m not celebrating it anymore.” She gestured to the store. “Do you want to go in? I haven’t been in here in weeks.”
“I haven’t been here since —” I stopped. I didn’t want to say it. I wanted to go in, but I didn’t want to have to say it.
Isabel opened the door for me. “I know.”
The bookstore was a different world in this gray, dead winter. The shelves, blue and slate, had taken on a different hue. The light was pure, pure white. Classical music played overhead, but the hum of the heater was the real soundtrack. I looked at the kid behind the counter — dark haired, lanky, bent over a book — and for a moment, a lump rose in my throat, too thick to swallow.
Isabel wrenched my arm, hard enough to hurt. “Let’s find books on getting fat.”
We went to the cookbook section and sat on the floor. The carpet was cold. Isabel made a huge mess, pulling out a stack next to her and putting them back in the wrong order, and I lost myself in the neat letters of the titles on the spines, absently pulling the books out so that they were flush with one another.
“I want to learn how to get fat,” Isabel said. She handed me a book on pastries. “How does that look?”
I paged through it. “All the measurements are in metric. And no cups. You’d have to get a digital scale.”
“Forget that.” Isabel put it back in the wrong place. “Try this one.”
This one was all on cakes. Beautiful chocolate layers bursting with raspberries, yellow sponges smothered with fluffy buttercream, cloying cheesecakes drizzled with strawberry nectar.
“You can’t take a piece of cake with you to school.” I handed her a book on cookies and bars. “Try that.”
“This is perfect,” Isabel accused, and set the book aside in a different pile. “Don’t you know how to shop? Being efficient isn’t a good thing. It doesn’t take enough time. I’m going to have to teach you the art of browsing. You’re clearly deficient.”
Isabel taught me browsing in the cookbook section until I was restless, and then I left her behind and wandered through the store. I didn’t want to, but I climbed the burgundy-carpeted stairs to the loft.
The snow-clouded day outside made the loft seem darker and even smaller than it had before, but the love seat was still there, and the little waist-high bookshelves Sam had searched through. I could still see the shape of his body curled in front of them, looking for the perfect book.
I shouldn’t have, but I sat on the couch and lay back on it. I closed my eyes and pretended as hard as I could that Sam was lying behind me, that I was secure in his arms, and that any moment I would feel his breath move my hair and tickle my ear.
I could almost smell him here, if I tried hard enough. There weren’t many places that still held his scent, but I could almost detect it — or maybe I just wanted to so badly that I was imagining it.
I remembered him urging me to smell everything in the candy shop. To give in to who I really was. I picked out the scents in the bookstore now: the nutty aroma of the leather, the almost perfumey carpet cleaner, the sweet black ink and the gasoline-smelling color inks, the shampoo of the boy at the counter, Isabel’s fragrance, the scent of the memory of me and Sam kissing on this couch.
I didn’t want Isabel to find me with my tears any more than she wanted me to find her with hers. We shared a lot of things now, but crying was one thing we never talked about. I wiped my face dry with my sleeve and sat up.
I walked to the shelf where Sam had gotten his book, scanned the titles until I recognized it, then pulled the volume out. Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. I lifted it to my nose to see if it was the same copy. Sam.
I bought it. Isabel bought the cookbook on cookies, and we went to Rachel’s place and baked six dozen thumbprint cookies while carefully not talking about Sam or Olivia. Afterward, Isabel drove me home and I shut myself in the study with Rilke, and I read and I wanted.
And leaving you (there aren’t words to untangle it)
Your life, fearful and immense and blossoming,
so that, sometimes frustrated, and sometimes understanding,
Your life is sometimes a stone in you, and then, a star.
I was beginning to understand poetry.
It wasn’t Christmas without my wolf. It was the one time of year I’d always had him, a silent presence lingering at the edge of the woods. So many times, I’d stood by the kitchen window, my hands smelling of ginger and nutmeg and pine and one hundred other Christmas smells, and felt his gaze on me. I’d look up to see Sam standing at the edge of the woods, golden eyes steady and unblinking.
Not this year.
I stood at the kitchen window, my hands smelling of nothing. No point baking Christmas cookies or trimming a tree this year; in twenty-four hours, I’d be gone for two weeks with Rachel. On a white Florida beach, far away from Mercy Falls. Far away from Boundary Wood, and most of all, far away from the empty backyard.
I slowly rinsed out my travel cup, and for the thousandth time this winter, lifted up my gaze to look to the woods.
There was nothing but trees in shades of gray, their snow-laden branches etched against a heavy winter sky. The only color was the brilliant flash of a male cardinal, flapping to the bird feeder. He pecked at the empty wooden base before wheeling away, a red spot against a white sky.
I didn’t want to go out into the backyard with its unmarked snow, devoid of pawprints, but I didn’t want to leave the feeder empty while I was gone, either. Retrieving the bag of birdseed from under the kitchen sink, I pulled on my coat, my hat, my gloves. I went to the back door and slid it open.
The scent of the winter woods hit me hard, reminding me fiercely of every Christmas that had ever mattered.
Even though I knew I was alone, I still shivered.
I watched her.
I was a ghost in the woods, silent, still, cold. I was winter embodied, the frigid wind given physical form. I stood near the edge of the woods, where the trees began to thin, and scented the air: mostly dead smells to find this time of the season. The bite of conifer, the musk of wolf, the sweetness of her, nothing else to smell.
She stood in the doorway for the space of several breaths. Her face was turned toward the trees, but I was invisible, intangible, nothing but eyes in the woods. The intermittent breeze carried her scent to me again and again, singing in another language of memories from another form.
Finally, finally, she stepped onto the deck and pressed the first footprint into
the snow of the yard.
And I was right here, almost right within reach, but still one thousand miles away.
Every step I took toward the feeder took me closer to the woods. I smelled the crisp leaves of the undergrowth, shallow creeks moving sluggishly beneath a crust of ice, summer lying dormant in unnumbered skeleton trees. Something about the trees reminded me of the wolves howling at night, and that reminded me of the golden wood of my dreams, hidden now under a blanket of snow. I missed the woods so much.
I missed him.
I turned my back to the trees and set the bag of birdseed on the ground beside me. All I had to do was fill the feeder and go back inside and pack my bags to fly away with Rachel, where I could try to forget every secret that hid inside these winter woods.
I watched her.
She hadn’t noticed me yet. She was knock, knock, knocking ice off the bird feeder. Slowly and automatically following the steps to clean it and open it and fill it and close it and just look at it as if it was the most important thing in the world.
I watched her. Waited for her to turn and glimpse my dark form in the woods. She pulled her hat down over her ears, blew out a puff of breath to watch it swirl a cloud in the air. She clapped the snow from her gloves and turned to go.
I couldn’t hide anymore. I blew out a long breath as well. It was a faint noise, but her head turned immediately toward it. Her eyes found the mist of my breath, and then me as I stepped through it, slow, cautious, unsure of how she would react.
She froze. Perfectly still, like a deer. I kept approaching, making hesitant, careful prints in the snow, until I was out of the woods and I was standing right in front of her.
She was as silent as I was, and perfectly still. Her lower lip shook. When she blinked, three shining tears left crystal tracks on her cheeks.
She could’ve looked at the tiny miracles in front of her: my feet, my hands, my fingers, the shape of my shoulders beneath my jacket, my human body, but she only stared at my eyes.
The wind whipped again, through the trees, but it had no force, no power over me. The cold bit at my fingers, but they stayed fingers.
“Grace,” I said, very softly. “Say something.”
“Sam,” she said, and I crushed her to me.
A CONVERSATION WITH MAGGIE STIEFVATER
Q: What inspired you to write Shiver?
A: I would like to say that I was inspired to write Shiver by some overwhelming belief in true love, but here’s my true confession. I wrote Shiver because I like to make people cry. I had just finished reading The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger for the second time, and I cried for the second time. I should tell everyone now that I am not a big crier at books. I am kind of a serial career non-crier actually. If you look up schadenfreude on Wikipedia, you’ll see a picture of me with a snide smile on my face. And so the fact that this book had made me cry not once but twice, and not just cry but storm around the house doing the seven stages of grief, it really kind of inspired in me this desire to do the same thing to other people. And so with Shiver, I wanted to write a book that would make someone sneak a peek of it in their cubicle, and then mascara would run down their face, and they could shake their fist at the sky and curse me to the heavens.
Q: Have you always had a fascination with wolves?
A: I haven’t always had a fascination with wolves, but I’ve always been kind of animal crazy. When I was a child, I spent hours and hours watching those animal programs on National Geographic. And if my parents ever wanted to get me out of the house, they just sent me outside and told me that there were animals walking around in the woods for me to look at. So it was nice to write a book that had so much of a connection with nature.
Q: You are the mother of two young children. Has being a mom changed you as an artist?
A: Being a mom really hasn’t changed me as an artist. It doesn’t change my subject matter, but I will say it has definitely added to the time crunch. I used to just doodle and do art all the time, and now it’s very much squeezing it in between. But one of the most rewarding things about being a mom is that I’ve been able to teach my kids from the ground up art and music and writing. My daughter’s already starting to read, which is very fun, and she’s already incredible with a pencil, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing the way she turns out.
Q: What writers have inspired you?
A: I have been inspired by so many writers over the years. I always had my nose stuck in a book as a kid and even now I always have a book in my hand. But I have to say, if I was going to pick a few out of a hat, I would go with Diana Wynne Jones because I love that she writes fantasy that is funny. It’s serious, the plot is serious, but her characters realize how ludicrous the situations are that they’re in, and they comment on it. I love Susan Cooper because she’s great at setting mood. I love M.T. Anderson’s use of voice, he’s just fantastic and humbling. And then Jane Yolen is like a classic for all fantasy writers, she does a great job of putting folk tales into her stories. I do have a bunch of adult books that I enjoy as well. I obviously love The Time Traveler’s Wife, and I recently read Crow Lake, Year of Wonders, and The Secret Life of Bees and I’ve enjoyed them all immensely.
Q: You are an artist, a musician, and an author. Which came first—writing, music, or art?
A: I first started working as an artist about two years after I got out of college. When I graduated from college, I went straight to work for a federal contractor, a desk job, and they were great to me, they loved me, I was like their mascot, but I just couldn’t stand working in an office. I just hated it. And so one day I went in and said, “I’m sorry, this is my two-weeks notice, I’m quitting to become an artist.” And of course, I hadn’t been an artist before then and I don’t think I was very good then either, but I just decided that was the way to go. And so my boss looked at me and he said, “Well, Maggie, when you want your job back, when you can’t make a living, it’s always here for you.” And you know what, I made my living in that first year and never looked back, and I will never ever have a job with a cubicle.
Q: Does your work in one affect the others?
A: When I was a teen, I thought I would have to choose between my writing or my music or my art, but it turns out it’s a difficult juggling game but I can do all of them. Like right now, when I wrote Shiver, I got to do some fan art as well of my own, I sketch wolves a lot and I got to write a piece of music for it as well. So I like to think that it’s like “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” Does anyone know that poem anymore? The one where it’s the bunch of blind men who all have a different part of an elephant that they’re feeling and they’re guessing what the animal is. And eventually they come to the conclusion that it is actually an elephant. I feel like my writing and my music and my art are the same way, where they’re all describing different sides of the same animal.
Q: Since art is so important to you, what are the sights and sounds that surround you while you write? Do you listen to music?
What did you listen to while writing Shiver?
A: While I’m writing, I absolutely have to have music playing in the background. I just cannot focus without music to keep me grounded. Otherwise all I think about while I’m sitting there at the computer is how I need to do my laundry or walk the dogs or I really need to eat some of that cookie dough I just made. So, to keep my butt in the chair, I play music. And it can’t be just any music, it has to be a soundtrack that I’ve picked out beforehand during the plotting process that kind of underlines the mood that I’m trying to make with the book. And so with Shiver, when I was plotting, the song that first really inspired me with the mood was The Bravery’s “The Ocean.” It’s this incredibly, incredibly sad song that has bittersweet lyrics about losing your lover. I also listened to mix tapes that had Snow Patrol and Joshua Radin and a bunch of other acoustic singer-songwriters on them.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now, I’m working on the sequel to Shiver, Linge
r, and I can’t tell you anything about it because anything I say would give away the ending of Shiver. And then I’m also working on a little side project, which is kind of like Shiver, it’s a love story with touches of the paranormal and I think that people who like Shiver will like it as well.
Q: What do you like best about writing young adult fiction?
A: One of the things that I really like about young adult fiction is that you can explore the relationships between teens and their parents. I definitely think that teens are a product of their parents. You either end up just like them or you consciously make the decision to be unlike them. And so with Sam, I wanted to show how it was that he turned out to be so sensitive and creative. So I showed Sam’s adoptive parents, Beck and the Pack, and they’re all very creative and supportive, so he grows up in that loving relationship, which turns him into who he is. Grace, on the other hand, is very independent, and it’s not enough to just say that she’s independent, you have to show why she is and so when you look at her parents, they’re very absent, so basically Grace has been raising herself.
These acknowledgments will suck. I’m just warning you. Once a project gets as big as Shiver (both in length of manuscript and length of writing), the list of people to thank becomes a cast of thousands. I know y’all don’t want to read about a cast of thousands, so I’ll keep this brief. If your name is supposed to be on here and isn’t, I’m sorry — I either forgot it in a senior moment or can’t remember how to spell it.
Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) Page 29