Linger

The other voice was friendly. “Who is this?”

“Who is this?”

I heard Grace’s voice, finally. “Mom! Give me that!” There was a shuffling sound and then Grace said, “Sorry about that. I’m grounded, and apparently that means that people can screen my calls without asking me.”

Color me impressed. Saint Grace got grounded? “What did you do?”

I heard a door shut on her side of the phone. Not quite a slam, but more defiant than I would’ve expected from Grace. She said, “Got caught sleeping with Sam.”

My face in the bathroom mirror opposite me looked surprised, eyebrows hiked up toward my hairline, the black liner around my eyes making them look even bigger and rounder than they really were. “This is the good stuff! You guys were having sex?”

“No, no. He was just sleeping in my bed. They’re completely overreacting.”

“Oh, of course they are,” I said. “Everyone’s parents are cool with their daughters sharing bed space with their boyfriends. I know my parents would love it. So, what, they kept you from going to school? That seems…”

“No, that’s because I was in the hospital,” Grace said. “I got a fever, and again they overreacted and took me to the hospital instead of giving me Tylenol. I think they just wanted a good reason to take me in the opposite direction from Sam. Anyway, it took forever, of course, like it always does in a hospital, and I didn’t get home until late. So I just woke up, basically.”

For some reason my thoughts immediately ran to Grace looking up at Mr. Grant and asking to be excused for her headache. “What’s wrong with you? What did the doctors say?”

“Virus, or something. It was just a fever,” Grace said, so fast that I barely had time to get out my questions. It didn’t sound like she believed herself.

The bathroom door came open slightly behind me and I heard, “Isabel, I know you’re in there.” Ms. McKay, my English teacher. “If you keep skipping lunch, I’m going to have to tell your parents. Just saying. Class is in ten minutes.”

The door swung shut once more.

Grace said, “Are you not eating again?”

I said, “Shouldn’t you be more worried about your problems at the moment?”

• COLE •

After Sam had disappeared to “work,” whatever that was, I poured myself a glass of milk and wandered back into the living room to look through some drawers. In my experience, drawers and backpacks were great ways to get to know a person. The end tables in the living room only offered up remote controls and PlayStation controls, so I headed into the office I’d passed on the way from my bedroom.

It was a way better jackpot. The desk was stuffed with papers, and the computer wasn’t password protected. The room was practically made for ransacking, situated on the corner of the house with windows on two walls, one pair of them facing the street, so I would have plenty of warning if Sam returned. I set my glass of milk down next to the mouse pad (someone had drawn doodles all over the pad with a Sharpie, including a sketch of a very large-breasted girl in a schoolgirl outfit) and made myself comfortable in the chair. The office was like the rest of the house—homey and masculine and comfortable.

On top of the desk, there were some bills, all addressed to Beck and all marked paid by automatic withdrawal. Bills were not interesting. A brown leather day planner sat next to the keyboard. Day planners were not interesting, either. I opened a drawer instead. A bunch of software programs, mostly utilitarian stuff, but a handful of games as well. Also not interesting. I went for the bottom drawer and was rewarded by a swirl of dust, which is what people use to cover their best secrets. Then, a brown envelope labeled sam. Now we were getting somewhere. I pulled out the first sheet. Adoption paperwork.

Here we go.

I shook the contents of the envelope on the desk, reaching in to pull out some of the smaller sheets that stayed inside. Birth certificate: Samuel Kerr Roth, showing that he was about a year younger than me. A photograph of Sam, knobby and small but still bearing the same flop of dark hair and heavy-lidded eyes I’d noticed the night before. His expression was complicated. Last night, the freakish wolf-yellow of his eyes had caught my attention; when I pulled the photo closer, I saw that baby Sam had the same yellow irises. So they weren’t colored contacts. Somehow that made me feel slightly friendlier toward him. I put down the photo. Beneath it was a sheaf of browning newspaper clippings. My eyes scanned the stories.

Gregory and Annette Roth, a Duluth couple, were charged last Monday with the attempted murder of their seven-year-old son. Authorities have placed their child (not named here to protect identity) into state custody. His fate will be decided after the Roths’ trial. The Roths allegedly held their son in a bathtub and cut his wrists with a razor. Shortly after the act, Annette Roth confessed to the next-door neighbor, saying that her son was taking too long to die. Both she and Gregory Roth told the police that their son was possessed by the devil.

I felt a thick, disgusted glob in the back of my throat that wouldn’t go away when I swallowed. I was having a hard time not thinking of Victor’s little brother, who was eight now. I flipped back to the photo of Sam holding Beck’s hand and looked once more at Sam, his half-closed eyes staring at some point past the camera, vacant. The position of his small hand in Beck’s turned his wrist toward the camera, clearly showing the recent red-brown slash across it.

A little voice in my head said And you feel sorry for yourself.

I shoved the newspaper clippings and the photograph back into the envelope so that I didn’t have to look at them, and looked at the sheaf of paperwork underneath instead. It was trust paperwork, naming Sam as the beneficiary of the trust—which included the house—and the contents of a checking account and a savings account, both bearing Beck’s and Sam’s names.

Pretty heavy stuff. I wondered if Sam knew that he basically owned the place. Underneath the paperwork was another black day planner. Flipping through it, I saw journal entries with the efficient, backward-slanting writing of a left-hander. I turned to the first page: “If you’re reading this, I’m either a wolf for good, or you’re Ulrik and you should get the hell out of my stuff.”

I jerked when the phone rang.

I watched it ring twice, and then I picked it up. I answered, “Da.”

“Is this Cole?”

My spirits inexplicably rose. “Depends. Is this my mother?”

Isabel’s voice was sharp over the phone. “I wasn’t aware you had one. Does Sam know that you’re picking up the phone now?”

“Were you calling for him?”

A pause.

“And is that your number on the caller ID?”

“Yeah,” said Isabel. “Don’t call it, though. What are you doing? You’re still you?”

“For the moment. I’m looking through Beck’s stuff,” I said, shoving the SAM envelope and its contents back in the drawer.

“Are you kidding me?” Isabel asked. She answered her own question. “No, you’re not.” Another pause. “What did you find?”

“Come and look.”

“I’m at school.”

“Talking on the phone?”

Isabel considered. “I’m in the bathroom trying to work up enthusiasm for my next class. Tell me what you found. Some ill-gotten knowledge will cheer me up.”

“Sam’s adoption papers. And some newspaper clippings about how his parents tried to kill him. Also, I found a really bad sketch of a woman wearing a schoolgirl outfit. It’s definitely worth seeing.”

“Why are you talking to me?”

I thought I knew what she meant, but I said, “Because you called me.”

“Is it because you just want to sleep with me? Because I’m not sleeping with you. Nothing personal. But I’m just not. I’m saving myself and all that. So if that’s why you want to talk to me, you can hang up now.”

I didn’t hang up. I wasn’t sure if that answered her question.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Well, are you going to actually answer my question?”

I pushed my empty milk glass back and forth.

“I just want someone to talk to,” I said. “I like talking to you. I don’t have a better answer than that.”

“Talking isn’t really what we were doing either time we saw each other,” she said.

“We talked,” I insisted. “I told you about my Mustang. That was a very deep, personal conversation about something very close to my heart.”

“Your car.” Isabel sounded unconvinced. She paused, then finally said, “You want to talk? Fine. Talk. Tell me something you’ve never told anybody else.”

I thought for a moment. “Turtles have the second-largest brains of any animal on the planet.”

It took Isabel only a second to process this. “No, they don’t.”

“I know. That’s why I’ve never told anybody that before.”

There was a sound on the other side like she was either trying not to laugh or having an asthma attack. “Tell me something about you that you’ve never told anybody else.”

“If I do, will you do the same?”

She sounded skeptical. “Yeah.”

I traced the outline of the Sharpie schoolgirl on the mouse pad, thinking. Talking on a telephone was like talking with your eyes closed. It made you braver and more honest, because it was like talking to yourself. It was why I’d always sung my new songs with my eyes closed. I didn’t want to see what the audience thought of them until I was done. Finally, I said, “I’ve been trying not to be my father my entire life. Not because he’s so horrible, but because he’s so impressive. Anything—anything I do can’t possibly compare.”

Isabel was silent. Maybe waiting to see if I was going to say more. “What does your father do?”

“I want to hear what you’ve never told anyone.”

“No, you have to talk first. You wanted to talk. It means you say something, and I respond, and you talk back again. It’s one of the human race’s most shining achievements. It’s called a conversation.”

I was beginning to regret this particular one. “He’s a scientist.”

“A rocket scientist?”

“A mad scientist,” I said. “A very good one. But really, I don’t want to have any more of this conversation until a much later date. Like possibly after my death. Now can I hear yours?”

Isabel took a breath, loud enough for me to hear it over the phone. “My brother died.”

The words had a ring of familiarity to them. Like I’d heard them before, in her voice, though I couldn’t imagine when. After I finished thinking that, I said, “You’ve told someone that before.”

“I never told anyone before that it was my fault, because everybody already thought he was dead by the time he actually died,” Isabel said.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”