I felt suddenly shy, as uncertain and excited as I had been the first time I met him.
Without turning on the front light, I joined him at the railing, not sure of what to say. I felt like I wanted to jump up and down and grab him around the neck and punch his chest and grin like a crazy person or cry. I wasn’t sure what the protocol for this was.
Sam turned to me, and in the dim light from the window, I saw that there was stubble on his chin. While I was gone, he had gotten older. I reached up and scrubbed his stubble with my hand, and he smiled ruefully.
“Does that hurt?” I asked. I rubbed his stubble against the grain. I’d missed touching him.
“Why would it?”
“Because it’s going the wrong way?” I suggested. I was overwhelmingly happy to be standing here, my hand on his unshaven cheek. Everything was terrible, but everything was fine, too. I wanted to be smiling, and I thought my eyes probably already were, because he was sort of smiling, too, a puzzled one, like he wasn’t certain if that was what he meant to do.
“Also,” I said, “hi.”
Sam did smile then, and said softly, “Hey, angel.” He put his lanky arms around my neck in a fierce hug, and I wrapped mine around his chest to squeeze him as hard as I could. I loved to kiss Sam, but no kiss could ever be as wonderful as this. Just his breath against my hair and my ear smashed up against his T-shirt. It felt like together, we were a sturdier creature, Grace-and-Sam.
Still locking me in his arms, Sam asked, “Did you eat something yet?”
“A bread sandwich. I also found some clogs. Not to eat.”
Sam laughed softly. I was so glad to hear it, so hungry to hear him. He said, “We aren’t very good at shopping.”
Into his shirt — he smelled like fabric softener — I mumbled, “I don’t like grocery shopping. It’s the same thing over and over every week. I’d like to make enough money, one day, that someone else would do it for me. Do you have to be rich for that? I don’t want a fancy house. Just someone else to do the shopping.”
Sam considered. He hadn’t loosened his hold on me yet. “I think you always have to do your own shopping.”
“I’ll bet the Queen doesn’t shop for herself.”
He blew a breath out over the top of my hair. “But she always eats the same thing every day. Eel jellies and haddock sandwiches and scones with Marmite.”
“I don’t think you even know what Marmite is,” I said.
“It’s something you put on bread and it’s disgusting. That’s what Beck told me.” Sam pulled his arms free and leaned on the railing instead. He eyed me. “Are you cold?”
It took me a moment to realize the implication: Will you shift?
But I felt good, real, firmly me. I shook my head and joined him at the railing. For a moment we just stood there in the darkness and looked out into the night. When I glanced over at Sam, I saw that his hands were knotted together. The fingers of his right hand squeezed his left thumb so tightly that it was white and bloodless.
I leaned my head against his shoulder, just his T-shirt between my cheek and his skin. At my touch, Sam sighed — not an unhappy sigh — and said, “I think those are the northern lights.”
I shifted my gaze without lifting my head. “Where?”
“Over there. Above the trees. See? Where it’s sort of pink.”
I squinted. There were a million stars. “Or it could be the lights from the gas station. You know, that QuikMart outside of town.”
“That’s a depressing and practical thought,” Sam said. “I’d rather it was something magical.”
“The aurora borealis isn’t any more magical than the QuikMart,” I pointed out. I had done a paper on it once, so I was more aware of its science than I might have otherwise been. Though I had to admit that I did find the idea of solar wind and atoms playing together to create a light show for us a little magical anyway.
“That’s also a depressing and practical thought.”
I lifted my head and shifted to look at him instead. “They’re still beautiful.”
“Unless it really is the QuikMart,” Sam said. He looked at me then, in a pensive way that made me feel a little fidgety. He said, reluctantly, as if suddenly remembering his manners, “Are you tired? I’ll go back in with you, if that’s what you want.”
“I’m not tired,” I said. “I want to just be with you for a while. Before everything gets difficult and confusing.”
He frowned off into the night. Then, all in a rush, he said, “Let’s go see if those really are the northern lights.”
“You have an airplane?”
“I have a Volkswagen,” he replied valiantly. “We would have to get someplace darker. Farther away from the QuikMart. Into the wilds of Minnesota. You want to?”
And now he had the shy little grin on his face that I loved. It felt like ages since I had seen it.
I asked, “Do you have your keys?”
He patted his pocket.
I gestured upstairs. “What about Cole?”
“He’s sleeping, like everyone else at this time of night,” Sam said. I didn’t tell him that Cole wasn’t sleeping. He saw my hesitation and mistook the meaning of it. “You’re the practical one. Is it a bad idea? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”
“I want to go,” I said. I reached down and took his hand firmly. “We won’t be gone long.”
Getting into the Volkswagen in the dark driveway, the car rumbling to life, it felt like we were conspiring to something greater than just chasing lights in the sky. We could be going anywhere. Chasing the promise of magic. Sam turned up the heat all the way while I moved my seat back — someone had moved it all the way forward. Reaching over the center console, Sam briefly squeezed my hand before grabbing the gearshift and backing out of the driveway.
“Ready?”
I grinned at him. For the first time since the hospital, since before the hospital, I felt like the old Grace, the one who could do anything she put her mind to. “I was born ready.”
We raced down the street. Sam reached over to brush the top of my ear with his finger; the action made him send the car slightly crooked. Looking hurriedly back to the road, he laughed at himself, just a little, as he straightened the wheel.
“Watch out the window,” he said. “Since I can’t seem to remember how to drive. Tell me where to go. Where it’s brightest. I’m trusting you.”
I pressed my face against the window and squinted at the hint of lights in the sky. At first, it was hard to tell which direction the lights were coming from, so I just directed Sam down the darkest roads first, farthest away from house lights and town. And now, as the minutes passed, it became easier to find a path north. Every turn took us farther away from Beck’s house, farther away from Mercy Falls, farther away from Boundary Wood. And then, suddenly, we were miles away from our real lives, driving down a straight-arrow road under a wide, wide sky punched through with hundreds of millions of stars, and the world was vast around us. On a night like tonight, it wasn’t hard to believe that, not so long ago, people could see by starlight alone.
“In 1859,” I said, “there was a solar storm that made the northern lights so strong, people could read by them.”