Cole broke off his idle singing and said, “Of course, I like that one with the minor chord better, but I couldn’t work it out.” He made an attempt at a different chord. The guitar buzzed at him.
“The guitar,” I said, “will only obey its master.”
“Yeah,” Cole agreed, “but Grace isn’t here.” He grinned at me slyly. He strummed the same D chord. “That’s the only one I can play. Look at that. Ten years of piano lessons, Ringo, and you put a guitar in my hand and I’m a drooling baby.”
Even though I’d heard him play the piano on the NARKOTIKA album, it was surprisingly difficult to imagine Cole taking piano lessons. To learn a musical instrument, you had to have a certain tolerance for tedium and failure. An ability to sit still helped, too.
I watched lightning jump from cloud to cloud; the air was getting the heavy feeling that comes before a storm. “You’re putting your fingers too close to the fret. That’s why you’re buzzing. Move them farther behind the fret and press harder. Just your fingertips, too, not the pad.”
I didn’t think I’d described it very well, but Cole moved his fingers and played a chord perfectly, no buzzing or dead strings.
Looking dreamily up at the sky, Cole sang, “Just a good-lookin’ guy, sitting on a stump …” He looked back to me. “You’re supposed to sing the next line.”
It was a game that Paul and I had used to play, too. I considered if I was too annoyed at Cole for making fun of my music to play along. After a slightly too long pause, I added, mostly the same note, halfhearted, “Watching all the satellites.”
“Nice touch, emo-boy,” Cole said. Thunder rumbled distantly. He played yet another D chord. He sang, “I’ve got a one-way ticket to the county dump …”
I sat up on my elbows. Cole strummed for me and I sang, “’Cause I turn into a dog each night.”
Then I said, “Are you going to play that same chord for every single line?”
“Probably. It’s my best one. I’m a one-hit wonder.”
I reached for the guitar, and felt like a coward for doing it. To play this game with him felt like I was condoning the events of the night before; what he did to the house each week, what he did to himself every minute of every day. But as I took the guitar from him and strummed the strings lightly to see if it was in tune, it felt like a far more familiar language than any I would use to hold a serious conversation with Cole.
I played an F major.
“Now we’re cooking with gas,” Cole said. But he didn’t sing another line. Instead, now that I was sitting with the guitar, he took my place, lying down on the stump and staring at the sky. Handsome and put together, he looked as if he had been posed there by an enterprising photographer, like last night’s seizure hadn’t even fazed him. “Play the minor chord one.”
“Which —?”
“The good-bye one.”
I looked at the black woods and played an A minor. For a moment, there was no sound except for some sort of insect crying out from the woods.
Then Cole said, “No, sing the actual song.”
I thought of the little mocking change to his voice when he sang my summer girl lyrics and said, “No. I don’t — no.”
Cole sighed, as if he’d anticipated disappointment. Overhead, thunder rumbled, seemingly in advance of the storm cloud, which was cupping around the tops of the trees like a hand hiding a secret. Picking absently at the guitar because it made me feel calmer, I gazed upward. It was fascinating how the cloud, even between lightning flashes, seemed lit from within, collecting the reflected light of all the houses and cities that it passed over. It looked artificial in the black sky: purplish gray and sharply edged. It seemed impossible that something like it would exist in nature.
“Poor bastards,” Cole said, his gaze still on the stars. “They must get pretty tired of watching us make the same damn mistakes all the time.”
I suddenly felt incredibly lucky to be waiting. Because no matter how it gnawed at me, demanded my wakefulness, stole my thoughts, at the end of this endless waiting was Grace. What was Cole waiting for?
“Now?” Cole asked.
I stopped playing the guitar. “Now what?”
Cole shoved himself up and leaned back on his hands, still looking up. He sang, completely unself-conscious — but of course, why would he be? I was an audience two thousand bodies smaller than he was used to.
“One thousand ways to say good-bye, one thousand ways to cry …”
I strummed the A minor chord that started the song and Cole smiled a self-deprecating smile as he realized he’d started in the wrong key. I played the chord again, and this time I sang it, and I wasn’t self-conscious, either, because Cole had already heard me through my car speakers and thus couldn’t be disappointed:
One thousand ways to say good-bye
One thousand ways to cry
One thousand ways to hang your hat before you go outside
I say good-bye good-bye good-bye
I shout it out so loud
’Cause the next time that I find my voice
I might not remember how
As I sang good-bye good-bye good-bye, Cole began to sing the harmonies that I’d recorded on my demo. The guitar was a little out of tune — just the B string, it was always the B string — and we were a little out of tune, but there was something comfortable and companionable about it.
It was one frayed rope thrown across the chasm between us. Not enough to get across, but maybe just enough to tell that it wasn’t as wide as I’d originally thought.
At the end, Cole made the hissed haaaa haaaaa haaaa of fake audience noise. Then, abruptly, he stopped and looked at me, his head cocked. His eyes were narrowed, listening.
And then I heard them.
The wolves were howling. Their distant voices cadenced and melodic, discordant for a moment before falling back into harmonies. Tonight they sounded restless but beautiful — waiting, like the rest of us, for something we couldn’t quite name.
Cole was looking at me still, so I said, “That’s their version of the song.”
“Needs some work,” Cole replied. He looked at my guitar. “But not bad.”
We sat in silence then, listening to the wolves howling between bursts of thunder. I tried unsuccessfully to pick out Grace’s voice among them, but heard only the voices I’d grown up with. I tried to remind myself that I’d just heard her real voice on the phone earlier that afternoon. It didn’t mean anything that her voice was absent now.
“We don’t need the rain,” Cole said.
I frowned at him.
“Back into the compound, I suppose.” Cole slapped his arm and flicked an invisible insect off his skin with deft fingers. He stood up, tucked his thumbs into his back pockets, and faced the woods. “Back in New York, Victor —”
He stopped. Inside the house, I heard the phone ring. I made a mental note to ask him What about New York? but when I got inside, it was Isabel on the phone, and she told me that the wolves had killed a girl and that it wasn’t Grace but I needed to turn on the damn television.
I turned it on and Cole and I stood in front of the couch. He crossed his arms while I thumbed through the channels.
The wolves were indeed on the news again. Once upon a time, a girl had been attacked by the wolves of Mercy Falls. The coverage then had been brief and speculative. The word then was accident.