But I didn’t have any answers.
So I could not sleep. I could not move.
I kept my eyes closed. The space beside me where Sam was supposed to be seemed huge. Before al this, when I had him with me, I would just rol over and press my face into his back when I woke up in the night. Let his breathing lul me back to sleep. But Sam wasn’t here tonight, and sleep seemed far away and irrelevant with the crawling heat inside me.
In my head, I heard Dad forbidding me to see him again. My breathing caught a little at the memory. He’d change his mind. He couldn’t mean that. I pushed my thoughts onto something else. My red coffeepot. I didn’t know if such a thing actual y existed, but if it did, I was buying one. Immediately. It seemed incredibly important to make it a goal. Get some money, buy a red coffeepot, move out. Find a new place to plug it in. I flipped onto my back and laid my hand on my stomach, trying to see if I could actual y feel the rol ing of stomach under my fingers. I was so hot again, and my head felt weird and floaty, disconnected from the rest of me.
The back of my mouth tasted like copper. No matter how much I swal owed, I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth.
I felt wrong.
What’s happening to me?
There was no one to ask, so I added up the clues for myself. The stomachache. The fever. Nosebleeds. Fatigue. The smel of wolf. The way the wolves had looked at me; the way Isabel had looked at me. Sam’s fingers on my arm as I left, turning to me for one last hug. They al seemed like so many good-byes.
Final y, my denial fel away.
Even though it could be just a virus. Even though it could be something serious but treatable. Even though I real y had no way of knowing…
I knew.
This pain I was feeling—it was my future. A change I couldn’t control. I could dream about red coffeepots al I wanted. But my body would have the final say.
I sat up in the darkness, pushing back against the wolf inside me, tugging the blankets so they pooled in my lap. I wanted to be with Sam. The cool air bit at my cheeks and bare shoulders. I wished I were stil at Beck’s house, back in Sam’s bed under his bedroom sky of birds. I swal owed down the pain, forced it deeper. If I were there now, he would wrap his arms around me and he’d tel me it would be al right, and it would be al right, at least for tonight. I imagined myself driving back there tonight. The look on his face.
I rubbed the bare bottoms of my feet against each other. It was foolish, of course. There were a thousand reasons to stay, but…
I pushed back the barbed static in my head. Focused. Mental y made a list of what I needed. I’d get a pair of jeans from the middle drawer of my dresser and slide on a sweater and some socks. My parents wouldn’t hear. The floor didn’t creak much. It was possible. I hadn’t heard any movement upstairs for a long time now. If I didn’t turn on my car lights, they might not notice me pul ing out of the driveway.
My heart was pounding now with the idea of escape.
I knew it wasn’t worth getting in more trouble with my parents, not as angry as they were. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to drive with this roar of blood in my ears, the fever trailing across my skin.
But I couldn’t real y get into more trouble. They’d already forbidden me to see him. What could they do that was beyond that?
And I didn’t know how many more nights I had.
My thoughts went to Mom, scoffing over the difference between love and lust. Me walking in the woods afterward, trying to dredge up guilt for yel ing at her. I thought about my dad opening my door to look for Sam. How long it had been since they had asked me where I’d been, how I was doing, if I needed anything from them.
I’d seen my parents together; they were family. They stil cared about the little details in each other’s lives. I’d seen Beck, too, and the way that he knew Sam. The way he loved him. And Sam, the way he stil orbited Beck’s memory like a lost satel ite. That was family. My parents and me…we lived together, sometimes.
Could you outgrow your parents?
I remembered the way the wolves had watched me. Remembered wondering how much time I had. How many nights I had to spend with Sam, how many nights I was wasting here alone.
I could stil taste the copper. The sickness inside me wasn’t getting any smal er. It raged, but I was stil stronger than it. There were stil things I had control over.
I got out of bed.
A sort of deadly calm fil ed me as I padded around my room, getting my jeans and underwear and shirts and two extra pairs of socks. The eye of the hurricane. I stuffed the clothes in my backpack with my homework and Sam’s beloved copy of Rilke from the bed stand. I touched the edge of my dresser, held my pil ow, stood by the window where I’d once stared down a wolf. My heart hummed in my chest, expecting at any moment for my mother or my father to open the door and find me in the midst of my preparations. Surely someone would have to just feel the seriousness of what I was doing.
But nothing happened. I got my toothbrush and hairbrush from the bathroom on my way down the hal , and the house stayed silent. I hesitated by the front door, my shoes in my hand, and listened.
Nothing.
Was I real y doing this?
“Good-bye,” I whispered. My hands were
trembling.
The door shushed across the welcome mat as I pul ed it shut behind me.
I didn’t know when I’d come back.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
• 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 fal ing against one another into the night. Joyful, voices lifted, cal ing down the moon.
Tonight, they were a cacophonous mob, howls vying for attention, barks interspersed. Restless. A pack discordant. A pack dispersed. They usual y 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 wel , surrounding me.
Do you miss me?
The disorganized cries continued, more protest than song.
I miss you guys.
And, with dul surprise, I realized that was al there was to it. I missed them. I didn’t miss it. This—this person leaning on the sash, ful of human memories person leaning on the sash, ful 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 swal owed the lie.
The night went quiet. T
he darkness was frozen into silence; no birdcal s or rustling of leaves in this stil , stil night. Just the distant hiss of tires on a far-off road.
“Roooooooooooo! ” I cal ed 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 spil ing 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 al along that she’d appear here? Hadn’t I just been waiting to find her in my doorway?
I final y 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 stil -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, final y, 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 final y, the sun.
“Hi,” I said, and I hugged her. I missed her more now that I actual y 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 rebel ious girl’s body, careful y 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 kil me. What would they do first, in the morning? Cal my cel phone? Hear it ringing wherever they’d hidden it? They could cal the police, if they wanted to. Like my dad said, I was stil 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 al .
“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 fal 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 hal , his bare feet padding on the floorboards. His bedroom was il uminated only by the hal 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’l turn off the hal 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 wal . The hal 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 rol ed toward me so that his head was on the same pil ow as mine.
When he kissed me, his lips soft and careful, it was al the thril of our first kiss and al the practiced familiarity of the accumulated memory of al 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 wil 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 stil intermittently sang, their cries rising and fal ing, hard to hear now. Sam, beside me, was very stil . “Do you miss it?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, so fast that I couldn’t believe he’d actual y 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 bal ed my shaking fists up against his chest. “Please stay with me.”
I could smel my own skin, the sick-sweet almond smel of me, and I knew he wasn’t talking about just tonight.
• SAM •
Folded in my arms you’re a butterfly in reverse giving up your wings inheriting my curse
you’re letting go of
me
you’re letting go
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
• 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 pil ow, pinning me to the bed. S
unlight 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, fal ing 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’l 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.” Normal y 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, bal ing 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; personal y, 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 real y had was an aversion to waiting rooms. “We’l go to the health center. They’re fast.”
Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02] Page 24