Appearances weren’t everything, I supposed.
The truck was silent. After a bit, Sam brought up the weather. He thought it was pretty smooth sailing from here on out. Koenig said he thought that was probably true, but you never knew what Minnesota had in store for you. She could surprise you, he said. I found myself pleased by him referring to Minnesota as a “she.” It seemed to render Koenig more benevolent, somehow. Koenig asked Sam what he was thinking of doing for college, and Sam mentioned that Karyn had offered him a full-time position at the bookstore, and he was considering it. No shame in that, commented Koenig. I thought about two-hundred-level classes and majors and minors and success quantified by a piece of paper and kind of wished they would change the subject.
Koenig did. “What about St. Clair?”
“Cole? Beck found him,” Sam said. “It was a charity case.”
Koenig glanced over. “For St. Clair or for Beck?”
“That’s something I ask myself a lot these days,” Sam replied. He and Koenig exchanged a look at this, and I was surprised to see that Koenig was regarding Sam as an equal, or, if not an equal, at least as an adult. I spent so much time alone with Sam that other people’s reactions to him and us together always seemed to come as a shock. It was hard to imagine how one guy could elicit so many different responses from other people. It was like there were forty different versions of Sam. I’d always assumed that everyone took me at face value, but now I wondered — were there forty different versions of Grace out there, too?
We all jumped when Sam’s phone rang from my bag — a bag packed with a change of clothing in case I shifted and a novel in case I needed to look busy — and Sam said, “Would you get that, Grace?”
I paused when I saw that the number on the phone wasn’t one that I recognized. I showed the screen to Sam as the phone rang again. He shook his head, puzzled.
“Should I?” I asked, tipping it in my hand as if to open it.
“New York,” Koenig said. He looked back to the road. “It’s a New York exchange.”
This information didn’t enlighten Sam. He shrugged.
I opened the phone and put it to my ear. “Hello?”
The voice on the other side was light and male. “Oh — right. Hello. Is Cole around?”
Sam blinked at me, and I could tell that he could hear the voice as well.
“I think you have a wrong number,” I said. Immediately, my brain processed what this meant — Cole had used Sam’s phone to call somewhere. Home? Would Cole have done that?
The voice was not perturbed. His voice was lazy and slippery, like a melting pat of butter. “No, I don’t. But I understand. This is Jeremy. We were in a band together.”
“With this person I don’t know,” I replied.
“Yes,” Jeremy said. “I have something I would like you to tell Cole St. Clair, if you would. I’d like you to tell him I have given him the best present in the world, and it took quite a lot of effort on my part, so I’d appreciate if he didn’t just tear the wrapping off and then throw it away.”
“I’m listening.”
“In eighteen minutes, the present is going to air on Vilkas’s radio spot. Cole’s parents will be listening, too, I’ve made sure of that. Do you have that?”
“Vilkas? What station is that on?” I asked. “Not that I’m saying anything.”
“I know what it is,” Koenig said, not looking up from the road. “Rick Vilkas.”
“That’s the one,” Jeremy said, overhearing him. “Someone has excellent taste. You sure that Cole isn’t around?”
“He really isn’t,” I said.
“Will you tell me something? When I last saw our intrepid hero Cole St. Clair, he was not in the best of places. In fact, I might say he was in the worst of them. All I want to know is, is he happy?”
I thought about what I knew of Cole. I thought about what it meant that he had a friend who cared that much about him. Cole could not have ever been terrible through and through, if someone cared this much about him from his past life. Or maybe he was just so great before he got terrible that he had a friend that rode that through to the other side. It sort of changed the way I thought about Cole, and sort of didn’t. “Getting there.”
There was a pause, and then Jeremy said, “And Victor?”
I didn’t say anything at all. Neither did Jeremy. Koenig turned the radio on, the volume down, and began to tune it.
Jeremy said, “They both died a long time ago. I was there to see it. You ever watched a friend die in his own skin? Ahh. Well, you can only raise so many of the dead. Getting there.” It took me a second to realize that he was repeating my answer from before. “I’ll take that. Tell him to listen to Vilkas, if you would. He changed my life. I won’t forget that.”
“I never said I knew where he was,” I said.
“I know it,” Jeremy replied. “I won’t forget that, either.”
The phone went quiet in my hand. I met Sam’s eyes. The almost-summer sun was bright on his face and turned his eyes shockingly, eerily yellow. For half a second, I wondered if his parents would have tried to kill a brown-eyed boy, a blue-eyed boy. Any son that didn’t have wolf’s eyes already.
“Call Cole,” Sam said.
I dialed Beck’s house. The phone rang and rang, and just as I was about to give up, the phone clicked, and a second later, “Da?”
“Cole,” I said, “turn on the radio.”
• COLE •
When I started everything, and by everything, I mean life, suicide was a joke. If I have to ride in that car with you, I’ll slash my wrists with a butter knife. It was as real as a unicorn. No, less real than that. It was as real as the explosion around an animated coyote. A hundred thousand people threaten to kill themselves every day and make a hundred thousand other people laugh, because like a cartoon, it’s funny and meaningless. Gone even before you turn off the TV.
Then it was a disease. Something other people got, if they lived someplace dirty enough to get the infection under their nails. It was not a pleasant dinner table conversation, Cole, and like the flu, it only killed the weak. If you’d been exposed, you didn’t talk about it. Wouldn’t want to put other people off their feed.
It wasn’t until high school that it became a possibility. Not an immediate one, not like It is a possibility I will download this album because the guitar is so sick it makes me want to dance, but possibility in the way that some people said when they grew up, they might be a fireman or an astronaut or a CPA who works late every single weekend while his wife has an affair with the guy who drives the DHL truck. It became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead.
Life was a cake that looked good on the bakery shelf but turned to sawdust and salt when I ate it.
I looked good when I sang the end.
It took NARKOTIKA to make suicide a goal. A reward for services rendered. By the time they knew how to say NARKOTIKA in Russia, Japan, and Iowa, everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I’d scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.