Rilke said:
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
That was how Cole found me, an hour later. Sitting cross-legged in the empty bathtub, my guitar in my lap, my fingers teasing out a G major chord, singing a song I’d never sung before.
• SAM •
wake me up
wake me up, you said
but I was sleeping, too
I was dreaming
but now I’m waking up
still waking up
I can see the sun
• GRACE •
I was wide awake.
Everything in the room was still and black, and I was sure I had just been dreaming of exactly this moment, only with someone standing by the bed.
“Sam?” I whispered, thinking that it had been only minutes I’d been sleeping, that he’d woken me up when he came to bed.
From behind me, I heard Sam make a low-pitched sleep sound. I could feel, now, that it was not blankets pushed up against me but instead a Sam-blanket. Under normal circumstances, this small gift of his presence would have thrilled me and then lured me back to sleep, but I was so certain that someone had been standing by the bed that it was disconcerting to realize that he was firmly entrenched next to me instead. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, wary. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, Sam’s paper cranes became visible, swaying and tipping, moved by an invisible wind.
I heard a sound.
It wasn’t quite a crash. It was an interrupted crash, like something falling and being caught. I held my breath, listening — it was coming from somewhere downstairs — and was rewarded with another muffled thump. The living room? Something knocking something over in the backyard?
“Sam, wake up,” I said urgently. Looking over, I had a disorienting jolt when I saw the reflections of Sam’s eyes in the darkness beside me; he was already awake and was silent. Listening, like me.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered.
He nodded. I didn’t so much see it as hear his head rubbing on the pillowcase behind him.
“Garage?” I suggested. He nodded again.
Another muffled scrape seemed to confirm my assessment. Sam and I tumbled out of bed in slow motion; both of us were still clothed in what we’d worn to chase the aurora borealis. Sam led the way down the stairs and then the hall, so it was me who first saw Cole emerging from the hallway to the downstairs bedrooms. His hair was crazily spiked. I had never thought, before, that he had spent any time on it at all — surely careless rock stars didn’t have to work at looking like careless rock stars — but now it was clear that spiky was its natural state and he took care to keep it from being that way. He wore only sweatpants. He looked more annoyed than alarmed.
In a low voice several degrees closer to sleep than wakefulness, Cole said, “What the hell?”
The three of us stood there, a bare-footed posse, and listened for another few minutes. There was nothing. Sam rubbed a hand through his hair, leaving it comically fanned. Cole held up a finger to his lips and pointed through the kitchen toward the garage door entrance. Sure enough, if I held my breath, I could still hear scuffling coming from that direction.
Cole armed himself with the broom from beside the fridge. I opted for a knife from the wooden block on the counter. Sam gave us both bemused looks and went empty-handed.
We stood outside the door, waiting for another noise. A moment later, another crash sounded out, this one louder than before, dinging off metal. Cole looked at me and raised his eyebrows, and at the same time, he opened the door and I reached in to hit the garage light.
And there was: nothing.
We looked at each other, mystified.
Into the garage, I said, “Is there anybody in here?”
Cole, sounding betrayed, said to Sam, “I can’t believe there was another car here all along and you didn’t tell me.”
The garage was, like most garages, filled to capacity with weird and smelly things that you didn’t want to keep in the house. Most of the space was filled by a crappy red BMW station wagon, dusty with the lack of use, but there were also the requisite lawn mower, a workbench covered with small metal soldiers, and a Wyoming license plate above the door that said BECK 89.
My eyes were drawn back to the station wagon.
I said, “Shh. Look!”
There was a weed whacker leaning askew against the hood of the car. I stepped into the garage ahead of the boys to lean it back up, and then noticed the slightly ajar hood. I pressed an experimental hand on it. “Was this like this before?”
“Yes. For the last decade,” Sam said, joining me. The BMW was not a thing of beauty, and the garage still smelled like whatever fluid it had been leaking last. He pointed to a crate of tools knocked over by the rear fender of the BMW. “That wasn’t like that, though.”
“Also,” Cole said, “listen.”
I heard what Cole had heard: a sort of scuffling underneath the car.
I started down but Sam caught my arm and knelt down himself to look.
“For crying out loud,” he said. “It’s a raccoon.”
“Poor thing,” I said.
“It could be a rabid baby-killer,” Cole told me primly.
“Shut up,” Sam said pleasantly, still peering under the vehicle. “I’m wondering how to get it out.”
Cole stepped past me, holding the broom like a staff. “I’m more interested in how it got in.”
He walked around the back of the car to the side door of the garage, which was slightly open. He tapped on the open door. “Sherlock found a clue.”
• SAM •
I said, “Sherlock should figure out how to get this guy out.”
“Or girl,” Cole said, and Grace regarded him approvingly. Holding the knife from the kitchen, she looked stark and sexy and like someone I didn’t associate with her body. Her repartee with Cole maybe should’ve made me jealous, but instead it made me glad — evidence, more than anything else, that I was starting to think of Cole as a friend. Everyone harbored the secret fantasy that everyone who was friends with them would also be friends with each other.
I padded to the front of the garage, grit pressing uncomfortably into the bottom of my bare feet, and tugged the garage door open. It rolled up into the ceiling with a terrific crash and the dark driveway with my Volkswagen spread out before me. It was an eerie and lonesome landscape. The cool night air, scented with new leaves and buds, bit at my arms and toes, and some potent combination of the cool breeze and the wide, wide night quickened my blood and called to me. I was momentarily lost with the force of my wanting.
With some effort, I turned back to Cole and Grace. Cole was already poking experimentally around the bottom of the car with the broomstick, but Grace was looking out into the night with an expression that I felt mirrored mine. Something like contemplation and yearning. She caught me looking at her and her face didn’t change. I felt like — I felt like she knew how I felt. For the first time in a very long time, I remembered waiting in the woods for her to shift, waiting for us both to be wolves at the same time.
“Come on, you bastard,” Cole said to the animal under the car. “I was having an excellent dream.”