I heard Grace breathing, slow and cautious, but she didn’t say anything.
“You don’t even shift anymore,” Grace said.
I knew the answer to that. With utmost certainty. “Cole could make it happen.”
Grace pulled one of my hands out of a pocket and rested my curled fingers in her palm. I felt her pulse, light and steady, against my thumb.
“I was beginning to take these for granted,” I said, moving my fingers against her skin. “I was beginning to think I’d never have to do it again. I was beginning to like the person I was.” I wanted to tell her how badly I didn’t want to shift again, how badly I didn’t even want to think about shifting. How I was starting to finally think of myself in present tense, life in motion instead of life, preserved. But I didn’t trust my voice to take me there. And admitting it out loud wouldn’t make what had to be done any easier. So again I was silent.
“Oh, Sam,” she said. She put her arms around my neck and let me rest my face against her skin. Her fingers moved through my hair. I heard her swallow. “When we —”
But she didn’t finish. She just squeezed my neck hard enough that my breath had to ease by her body to escape. I kissed her collarbone, her hair tickling my face. She sighed.
Why did everything feel like saying good-bye?
The forest was noisy around us: birds singing, water splashing, wind whispering sh-sh-sh through the leaves; this was the sound of its breathing before we arrived and would keep being such after we left. The cloth of this natural world was made of private, unspoken sorrows, and ours was just another stitch on the hem.
“Sam.” Koenig stood at the base of the outcropping. Grace and I stepped back from each other. I had one of Grace’s hairs in my mouth. I removed it. “Your phone rang and dropped the call before they could leave a message. There’s not enough reception out here for anyone to get through, really. It was your home number.”
Cole.
“We should get back,” Grace said, already climbing down with the same aplomb that she’d made the ascent. She stood beside Koenig and together they surveyed the rock and the surrounding forest until I joined them.
Koenig made the smallest of head gestures to the forest around us. “What do you think?”
I looked at Grace, so Koenig did, too. She just nodded.
“You, too?” Koenig asked me.
I smiled ruefully.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “This is a good place to be lost.”
• COLE •
In one hour, I called Sam’s cell phone as many times as I’d called Isabel’s cell phone in two months. To the same effect. Nothing. I could take it personally, but I liked to think that I’d learned my lesson. Patience. It was a virtue.
It had never been one of my strong points.
I called Sam. The phone rang and rang until my ears were tricked into believing that every other ring was longer.
The minutes stretched out indefinitely. I put on music, and even the songs moved in slow motion. I was irritated every time a refrain came around; it felt like I’d already listened to it one hundred times before.
I called Sam.
Nothing.
I trotted down the basement stairs, up to the kitchen. I’d cleaned my stuff up, mostly, but in the spirit of benevolence and distracting myself, I used a wet paper towel to wipe the kitchen counter and make a small pyramid of escaped coffee grounds and toaster crumbs.
I called Sam. More ringing. I jogged back down to the basement, then to my stash of things in my bedroom. I rummaged through all the supplies I’d gathered over the past several months, not really needing anything, just wanting to be busy, to move my hands. My feet ran whether or not I was standing up, so I might as well stand.
I called Sam.
Ring, ring, ring, ring. Ring, ring. Ring, ring.
I got a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and took them down to the basement. I laid them on the chair. Wondered if I should get a long-sleeved shirt or a sweater. No. A T-shirt was fine. No. Maybe a sweater. I got a Berkeley sweatshirt out of a drawer.
I called Sam.
Nothing. Nothing. Where in hell was he?
I jotted in Beck’s notebook that was now mine. I went back down to the basement. I checked the thermostat. I turned it as hot as it would go. I got space heaters from the garage. I found wall sockets in the basement and plugged them in. It was a barbecue down there. Not hot enough. I needed it to be summer inside these walls.
I called Sam.
Two rings. Three.
“Cole, what is it?” It was Sam. His voice was staticky, indistinct, but it was him.
“Sam,” I said. I sounded a little peevish at this point, but I felt I deserved it. I looked down at the wolf body on the floor in front of me. The sedatives were starting to wear off. “I’ve caught Beck.”
• SAM •
I hadn’t realized until Cole caught Beck that it was Chinese Day.
For the longest time, I’d thought Chinese Day was a real holiday. Every year on the same day in May, Ulrik or Paul and whoever else was there would take me and Shelby and head out for a day of festivities — balloon in my hand, museums visited, fancy cars we didn’t intend to buy taken for test drives — that concluded with an epic meal at Fortune Garden in Duluth. I didn’t eat much but the spring rolls and fortune cookies, but the association with the day of revelry made it my favorite restaurant regardless. We always ended up with a dozen white takeaway boxes that populated the refrigerator for weeks. Long after dark, we’d pull into the driveway and I’d have to be dragged and prodded up the stairs to bed.
Beck never came with us. Paul gave a different excuse every year. He has work and needs us out of the house or He was up late or He doesn’t celebrate Chinese Day. I didn’t think about it, really. There were plenty of other things going on that day to hold my attention. The truth was I was young and self-involved and, in the way of youth, I didn’t think about what my guardians did when I wasn’t with them. It was easy for me to imagine Beck working hard in his home office on that day, if I imagined anything at all.
So for years, Chinese Day came and went. Up at the crack of dawn and out of the house. As I got older, I began to see more details that I’d missed when I was younger. As we left, Ulrik or Paul would always take the phone off the hook, and they’d lock the front door behind us, as if no one were home.
By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I no longer fell asleep the moment we got home. Usually I would feign sleepiness so that I could retreat to my room with whatever new book or possession I’d acquired on that particular Chinese Day. I would creep out of my room only to pee before I finally turned out my light. One year, though, as I left my room, I heard — something. I still don’t remember what it was about the sound that made me pause in the hall. Something about it was out of place, unfamiliar.
So for the first time, I silently padded past the bathroom toward where Beck’s bedroom door was cracked open. I hesitated, listening, glancing behind me to make certain I wasn’t being watched. And then I took another soundless step forward so that I could see into Beck’s room.
The small lamp on his bedside table weakly illuminated his room. There was a plate in the middle of the floor with an untouched sandwich and browning slices of apple on it, and a full coffee mug beside it, an ugly ring around the edge where the milk had separated. A few feet away from that, sitting on the floor at the end of the bed, facing away from me, was Beck. There was something shocking to me about his posture, something that later I could never forget. His knees were drawn up to his chest like a boy’s and his hands were laced behind his head, pulling it down toward his body as if he were protecting it from an oncoming blast.