I realized that there had been a long pause, and that Karyn was still watching me.
“Did he come here a lot?” I asked. “Without me?”
Behind the counter, she nodded. “Often enough. He bought a lot of biographies.” She paused, contemplating this. She’d told me once that you could completely psychoanalyze someone based on the sort of books they read. I wondered what Beck’s love of biographies—I had seen the shelves and shelves of them at home—told her about him. Karyn went on, “I do remember the last thing he bought, because it wasn’t a biography, and I was surprised. It was a day planner.”
I frowned. I didn’t remember seeing it.
“One of those with spaces to write comments and journal entries on each day.” Karyn stopped. “He said it was to write down his thoughts for when he couldn’t remember to think them.”
I had to turn to the bookshelves then because of the sudden tears burning in my eyes. I tried to focus on the titles in front of me to pull my emotions back from the edge. I touched a spine with one of my fingers, while the words blurred and cleared, blurred and cleared.
“Is there something wrong with him, Sam?” Karyn asked.
I looked down at the floor, at the way the old wooden floorboards buckled a bit where they met the base of the shelves. I felt dangerously out of control, like my words were welling, ready to spill. So I didn’t say anything at all. I didn’t think about the empty, echoing rooms of Beck’s house. I didn’t think about how it was now me who bought the milk and the canned food to restock the shed. I didn’t think about Beck, trapped in a wolf’s body, watching me from the trees, no longer remembering, no longer thinking human thoughts. I didn’t think about how this summer, there was nothing—no one—to wait for.
I stared at a tiny, black knot in the floorboards at my feet. It was a lonely, dark shape in the middle of the golden wood.
I wanted Grace.
“I’m sorry,” Karyn said. “I didn’t mean to—I don’t mean to pry.”
I felt bad for making her feel awkward. “I know you don’t. And you’re not. It’s just—” I pressed my fingers to my forehead, on the epicenter of the ghostly headache. “He’s sick. It’s—terminal.” The words came out slowly, a painful combination of truth and lie.
“Oh, Sam, I’m sorry. Is he at the house?”
Not turning around, I shook my head.
“This is why Grace’s fever bothers you so much,” Karyn guessed.
I closed my eyes; in the darkness, I felt dizzy, like I didn’t know where the ground was. I was torn between wanting to speak and wanting to guard my fears, keeping control of them by keeping them private. The words came out before I could think them through. “I can’t lose both of them. I know…I know how strong I am, and I’m…not that strong.”
Karyn sighed. “Turn around, Sam.”
Reluctantly, I turned, and saw her holding up the legal pad with the inventory on it. She pointed with a pen to the letters SR, written in her handwriting at the bottom of my additions. “Do you see your initials on here? This is because I’m telling you to go home. Or somewhere. Go clear your head.”
My voice came out small. “Thank you.”
She ruffled my hair when I came over to collect my guitar and my book from the counter. “Sam,” she said, just as I was heading past her, “I think you’re made of stronger stuff than you think.”
I made my face into a smile that didn’t last to the back door.
Opening the door, I stepped right into Rachel. Through a tremendous stroke of luck or personal dexterity, I kept from dumping my green tea all over her striped scarf. She snatched it out of my way well after the danger of hot liquids had passed, and gave me a warning look.
“The Boy should watch where he’s going,” she said.
“Rachel should not manifest in doorways,” I replied.
“Grace told me to come in this way!” Rachel protested. At my puzzled look, she explained, “My natural talents don’t extend to parallel parking, so Grace said if I parked behind the store, I could just pull in and that nobody would mind if I walked in the back door. Apparently she was wrong because you tried to repel me with vats of burning oil and—”
“Rachel,” I interrupted. “When did you talk to Grace?”
“Like, last? Two seconds ago.” Rachel stepped backward to allow me enough room to step outside and close the door behind me.
Relief fell through me so fast that I almost laughed. Suddenly, I could breathe the cold air tinged with exhaust and see the tired green paint of the trash bins and feel the icy wind reaching an experimental finger into my shirt collar.
I hadn’t expected to see her again.
It sounded melodramatic now that I knew Grace was well enough to talk to Rachel, and I didn’t know why I would’ve jumped to that conclusion, but it didn’t make it any less true.
“It is freezing cold out here,” I said, and gestured to the Volkswagen. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, let’s,” Rachel said, and waited until I unlocked the doors to get in. I started the engine and put the heat up and pressed my hands over the air vents until I felt less anxious about the cold that couldn’t harm me. Rachel was managing to fill the entire car with some very sweet, highly artificial scent that was probably meant to be strawberry. She had to fold her stocking-covered legs on the seat in order to make room for her overflowing bag.
“Okay. Now talk,” I said. “Tell me about Grace. Is she okay?”
“Yeah. She went to the hospital last night, but she’s back again. She didn’t even stay overnight. She was fevered, so they doped her up with Tylenol out the wazoo and she got unfevered. She said she feels fine.” Rachel shrugged. “I’m supposed to get her homework. Which is why”—she kicked her stuffed backpack—“I’m also supposed to give you this.” She held out a pink phone with a cyclops smiley-face sticker on the back.
“Is this your phone?” I asked.
“It is. She said yours goes straight to voicemail.”
This time I did laugh, a relieved, soundless one. “What about hers?”
“Her dad took it from her. I can’t believe you two got caught. What were you guys thinking! You could’ve died from humiliation!”
I just gave her a look that was invested with as much dolor as physically possible. Now that I’d heard that Grace was alive and well, I could afford some melancholy humor at my own expense.
“Poor Boy,” Rachel said, patting my shoulder. “Don’t worry. They won’t stay mad at you forever. Give them a few days and they’ll be back to forgetting they have a daughter. Here. The phone. She’s allowed to take calls again now.”
I gratefully accepted it, punched in her number—“Number two on speed dial,” Rachel said—and a moment later I heard, “Hey, Rach.”
“It’s me,” I said.
• GRACE •
I didn’t know what emotion it was that flooded me when I heard Sam’s voice instead of Rachel’s. I just knew that it was strong enough that it made two of my breaths stick together into one long, shuddering exhalation. I steamrollered over the unidentified feeling. “Sam.”