I was surprised, a little, to hear that such things existed, but I shouldn’t have been. Those weren’t things that Sam generally would have sought out — facts were not the most interesting thing to him — and quite possibly it had been information he’d grown up knowing and already found not useful. “Do you think Beck would be very pleased that you were going through his stuff?” I softened the question with a smile.
Cole said, “He’s not here.” But then he seemed to think better of his short answer, because he said, voice earnest, “Beck said he wanted me to take over for him. Then he left. This is the only way I know how to learn anything. It beats the hell out of reinventing the wheel.”
“I thought Beck wanted Sam to take over for him?” Then I answered my own question. “Oh — I guess he thought that Sam wasn’t changing back. That’s why he recruited you.”
Well, that was why he recruited someone. Why he had chosen Cole in specific was less certain. At some point he must have seen this guy in front of me and thought that he would make a good pack leader. At some point he must’ve seen something of himself in Cole. I thought I could see it, maybe. Sam had Beck’s gestures, but Cole had … the strength of Beck’s personality? The confidence? There was something like the force of Beck’s character in Cole; where Sam was kind, Cole was driven.
Again Cole laughed that same cynical laugh. And again, I heard the bravado in it, but, it was like Isabel, where I had learned that you took away the cynical bit and heard the truth: the weariness and the loneliness. I still missed a lot of the nuances that Sam picked up on, but it wasn’t hard to hear when you were listening for it.
“Recruiting is such a noble-sounding verb,” Cole said, sitting up, pulling his legs toward him to sit cross-legged. “It makes me think about men in uniforms and great causes and signing up to protect the American way. Beck didn’t want me to die. That’s why he chose me. He thought I was going to kill myself, and he thought he would save me.”
I wasn’t going to let him get away with that.
“People kill themselves every day,” I said. “It’s, like, thirty thousand Americans a year or something like that. Do you really think that’s why he chose you? I don’t. It’s just not logical. Out of everyone in the world, obviously he picked you for a very specific reason, especially considering that you’re famous and otherwise a risk. I mean, logic. Logic.”
Cole smiled at me then, this sudden, broad thing that was pleasing in its realness. “I like you,” he said. “You can stay.”
“Where’s Sam?”
“Downstairs.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Hey — has Olivia shown up here yet?”
His expression didn’t change, signaling his ignorance as much as anything he could say. My heart sank, just a little. “Who?” he asked.
“One of the other wolves,” I said. “One of my friends who was bitten last year. My age.”
It pained me to think of her out in the woods going through the same thing I was.
Something strange flitted across Cole’s face then, too fast for me to interpret it. I just wasn’t that good at reading faces. He looked away from me, gathering up some of the papers, stacking them against his foot and then putting them down in such a way that they immediately became disorderly again. “Haven’t seen her.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’d better go find Sam.” I moved toward the door, feeling a strange little bubble of nerves in my rib cage. Sam was here, I was here, I was very firmly in my skin. I would be with him again. I was suddenly and irrationally afraid that I would see him and things would be different, somehow. That what I felt wouldn’t match up with what I saw, or that he would’ve changed how he felt about me. What if we had to start all over again, from scratch? I was filled at the same time with the knowledge that my fears were completely unfounded and with the realization that they just weren’t going to move until I saw Sam again.
“Grace,” Cole said as I started to leave.
I stopped in the doorway.
He shrugged. “Never mind.”
By the time I got out into the hall, Cole was already laid back on the bed, papers spread under him and over him and around him, surrounded by everything that Beck had left behind. He could have so easily looked lost, surrounded by all those memories and words, but instead, he looked buoyed, buffered by the pain that had come before him.
• ISABEL •
There was something about driving with my parents that always made me a worse driver. No matter how much time I’d spent with my hands gripped on a steering wheel, put a parental unit in the passenger seat and instantly I started braking too hard and turning too soon and hitting the wipers when I reached for the radio knob. And though I’d never been one to talk to people who couldn’t hear me (Sam Roth was turning out to be the notable exception to that), with a parent in the car, suddenly I found myself snarling at other drivers’ poor vanity plate choices or grousing about their slowness or commenting on their signal light coming on a full two miles before they planned to turn off.
Which was why, when my headlights illuminated the truck-thing half-pulled off the road, its nose pointing into the ditch, I said, “Oh, stellar parking job there.”
My mother, who’d become drowsy and benevolent from the wine and the hour, came to sudden attention. “Isabel, pull in behind them. They might need help.”
I just wanted to get home so that I could call Sam or Cole and find out what was going on with Grace. We were two miles from the house; this felt a little unfair on the part of the universe. In the far-off edge of my headlights, the stopped vehicle looked a little disreputable. “Mom, you’re the one who said to never stop in case I get raped or picked up by a Democrat.”
Mom shook her head and pulled a compact out of her purse. “I never said that. That sounds like your father.” She flipped down the visor to look at herself in the small, lighted mirror. “I would’ve said Libertarian.”
I slowed to a crawl. The truck — it was turning out to be a truck with one of those tall caps over the bed, the kind that you probably have to show ID proving you’re over fifty to buy — looked like it probably belonged to a drunk who’d stopped to puke.
“What would we do, anyway? We can’t … change a tire.” I struggled to think of what would make someone pull over, other than puking.
“There’s a cop,” Mom said. Sure enough, I saw that a cop car was parked by the side of the road as well; its lights had been blocked by the hulking truck. She added casually, “They might need medical assistance.”
Mom lived in hope of someone needing medical assistance. She was always very eager for someone to get hurt on the playground when I was little. She eyed line cooks at fast-food restaurants, waiting for a kitchen disaster to strike. In California, she used to stop at accidents all the time. As a superhero, her line was: “DOES ANYONE NEED A DOCTOR? I AM A DOCTOR!” My father told me once that I needed to go easy on her; she’d had a hard time getting her degree because of family issues, and she just liked the novelty of being able to tell people she was a doctor. Okay, fine, self-actualize yourself, but really, I thought she’d gotten over it.