Linger

The doe blinked again, face extraordinarily gentle, and my stomach lurched.

I couldn’t leave her like this. That was the thing. I knew I couldn’t. I confirmed my location with a quick glance around—a twenty-minute walk to the shed, maybe. Another ten to the house, if there was nothing to kill her with in the shed. Forty minutes to an hour of lying here with her guts exposed.

I could just walk away. She was dying, after all. It was inevitable, and how much did the suffering of a deer count for?

Her eye blinked again, silent and tolerant. A lot—that was how much it counted for.

I cast around for anything that might serve as a weapon. None of the stones by the lake were large enough to be useful, and I couldn’t imagine myself bludgeoning her to death, anyway. I ran through everything I knew of anatomy and instantly deadly car crashes and catastrophes. And then I looked back to her exposed ribs.

I swallowed.

It only took me a moment to find a branch with a sharp enough end.

Her eye rolled up toward me, black and bottomless, and one of her front legs twitched, a memory of running. There was something awful about terror trapped behind silence. About latent emotions that couldn’t be acted out.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t mean to be cruel.”

I stabbed the stick through her ribs.

Once.

Twice.

She screamed, this high scream that was neither human nor animal but something terrible in between, the sort of sound that you never forget no matter how many beautiful things you hear afterward. Then she was silent, because her punctured lungs were empty.

She was dead, and I wanted to be. I was going to find out how to keep myself a wolf. Or I just couldn’t do this anymore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

• GRACE •

I didn’t think I’d slept, but a knock on my bedroom door woke me, so I must’ve. I opened my eyes; it was still dark in my room. The clock said it was morning, but only barely. The numbers glowed 5:30.

“Grace,” my mother’s voice said, too loud for 5:30. “We need to talk to you before we go.”

“Go where?” My voice was a croak, still half asleep.

“St. Paul,” Mom said, and now she sounded impatient, like I should know. “Are you decent?”

“How can I be decent at five?” I muttered, but I waved a hand at her, since I was sleeping in a camisole and pj bottoms. Mom turned on the light switch, and I winced at the sudden brightness. I barely had time to see that Mom was in her billowy fair shirt before Dad appeared behind her. Both of them shuffled into my room. Mom’s lips were pressed into a tight, businesslike smile, and Dad’s face looked as if he had been sculpted from wax. I couldn’t remember a time I’d seen them both looking so uncomfortable.

They both glanced at each other; I could practically see the invisible talk bubbles over their head. You start. No, you start.

So I started. I said, “How are you feeling today, Grace?”

Mom waved a hand at me as if it was obvious I was all right, especially if I was well enough to be sarcastic. “Today’s the Artists Limited Series.”

She paused to see if she had to clarify further. She didn’t. Mom went every year—leaving before dawn with a vehicle packed full of art and not coming home until after midnight, exhausted and with a far emptier vehicle. Dad always went with her if he was off from work. I’d gone one year. It was a huge building full of moms and people buying paintings like Mom’s. I didn’t go again.

“Okay,” I said. “So?”

Mom looked at Dad.

“So, you’re still grounded,” Dad said. “Even though we’re not here.”

I sat up a little taller, my head tingling in protest as I did.

“So we can trust you, right?” Mom added. “To not do anything stupid?”

My words came out slow and distinct with the effort of not shouting them. “Are you guys just…trying to be vindictive? Because I—” I was going to say saved up forever to get this for Sam, but for some reason, the idea of finishing the sentence closed my throat up. I shut my eyes and opened them again.

“No,” Dad said. “You’re being punished. We said you were grounded until Monday, and that’s what’s happening. It’s unfortunate that Samuel’s appointment happened to be during that time frame. Maybe another day.” He didn’t look like he found it unfortunate.

“They’re booked for months in advance, Dad,” I said.

I didn’t think I’d ever seen the line of Dad’s mouth look so ugly. He replied, “Well, maybe you should’ve considered your actions a little more, then.”

I could feel a little pulsing headache just between my eyebrows. I pushed a fist into my skin and then looked up. “Dad, it was for his birthday. This was the only thing he got for his birthday. From anybody. It’s a really big deal for him.” My voice just—stopped. I had to swallow before I went on. “Please just let me go. Ground me Monday. Tell me to do community service. Make me scrub your toilets with my toothbrush. Just let me go.”

Mom and Dad looked at each other, and for a single, stupid moment, I thought they were considering it.

Then Mom said, “We don’t want you to be alone with him for that long. We don’t trust him anymore.”

Or me. Just say it.

But they didn’t.

“The answer’s no, Grace,” Dad said. “You can see him tomorrow, and be glad that we’re allowing even that.”

“Allowing that?” I demanded. My hands fisted the covers on either side of me. Anger was rising up in me—I felt my cheeks, hot as summer, and suddenly, I just couldn’t take it. “You’ve been ruling this particular part of the world via absentee ballot for most of my teenage years, and now you just ride in here and say, Sorry, Grace, no, this little bit of life that you have managed to make for yourself, this person you’ve chosen, you should be happy we’re not taking that, too.”

Mom threw up her hands. “Oh, Grace, really. Stop overreacting. As if we needed any more proof that you were not mature enough to be with him that much. You’re seventeen. You’ve got the rest of your life ahead of you. This is not the end of the world. In five years—”

“Don’t—” I said.

To my surprise, she didn’t.

“Don’t tell me I’ll have forgotten his name in five years or whatever you were about to say. Stop talking down to me.” I stood up, throwing my covers to the end of the bed as I did. “You two have been gone too long to pretend that you know what’s in my head. Why don’t you go to some dinner party or a gallery opening or a late-night house showing or an all-day art show and hope that I’ll be all right when you get back? Oh, that’s right. You already are. Pick one, guys. Parents or roommates. You can’t be one and then suddenly be the other.”

There was a long pause. Mom was looking off into the corner of the room like there was a fantastic song playing in her head. Dad was frowning at me. Finally, he shook his head. “We’re having a serious talk when we get home, Grace. I don’t think it was fair of you to start this when you knew that we wouldn’t be able to stay here to finish it.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, my hands fisted. He wouldn’t make me feel ashamed of what I’d said. He wouldn’t. I’d waited too long to say it.

Mom looked at her watch, and the spell was broken.

Dad was already heading out the door as he said, “We’ll talk about this later. We have to go.”

Mom added, sounding like she was mimicking something Dad had told her, “We’re trusting you to respect our authority.”

But they weren’t really trusting me with anything, because after they left, I walked into the kitchen and found that they’d taken my car keys.

I didn’t care. I had another set they didn’t know about in my backpack. There was something invisible and dangerous lurking inside me, and I was done being good.

I got to Beck’s house just after daybreak.

“Sam?” I called, but got no answer. The downstairs was clearly unoccupied, so I headed to the second floor. In no time at all I had found Sam’s bedroom. The sun was still below the trees and only anemic gray light came through the window in the room, but it was enough for me to see evidence of life: the sheets tossed aside on the bed and a pair of jeans crumpled on the floor next to a pair of inside-out dark socks and a discarded T-shirt.

For a long moment, I just stood by the bed, staring at the snarled sheets, and then I climbed in. The pillow smelled like Sam’s hair, and after nights of bad sleep without him, the bed felt like heaven. I didn’t know where he was, but I knew he’d be back. Already, it felt like I was with him again. My eyelids ached with sudden heaviness.

Behind my closed eyes I felt a tangled grip of emotions and feelings and sensations. The ever-present ache in my stomach. The pang of envy when I thought of Olivia as a wolf. The rawness of anger at my parents. The crippling ferocity of missing Sam. The touch of lips to my forehead.

Before I knew it, I had fallen asleep—or rather, I had woken up. It didn’t seem like any time at all had passed, but when I opened my eyes, I was facing the wall and the comforter was pulled up around my shoulders.

Usually when I woke up someplace other than my bed—at my grandmother’s, or the few times I’d been in a hotel when I was younger—there was a moment of confusion as my body figured out why the light was different and the pillow wasn’t mine. But opening my eyes in Sam’s room, it was just…opening my eyes. It was like my body had been unable to forget where I was even while I was sleeping.

So when I rolled back over to look into the rest of the room and saw birds dancing between me and the ceiling, there was no surprise. Just wonder. Dozens of origami birds of every shape, size, and color danced slowly in the air from the heating vents, life in slow motion. The now-brilliant light through the tall window cast moving bird-shaped shadows all around the room: on the ceiling, on the walls, over the top of the stacks and shelves of books, across the comforter, across my face. It was beautiful.

I wondered how long I’d slept. Also, I wondered where Sam was. Stretching my arms above my head, I realized I could hear the dull roar of the shower through the open door. Dimly, I heard Sam’s voice rise above the sound of the shower:

All these perfect days, made of glass

Put on the shelf where they can cast

perfect shadows that stretch and grow

on the imperfect days down below.

He sang the line over again, twice, changing stretch and grow to shift and glow and then shift and grow. His voice sounded wet and echoey.

I smiled, though there was no one to see it. The fight with my parents seemed like something that had happened to a longago Grace. Kicking back the blankets, I stood up, my head sending one of the birds into crazy orbit. I reached up to still it and then moved among the birds, looking at what they were made of. The one that had knocked against my head was folded out of newsprint. Here was one folded out of a glossy magazine cover. Another from a paper beautifully and intricately printed with flowers and leaves. One that looked like it had once been a tax worksheet. Another, misshapen and tiny, made out of two dollar bills taped together. A school report card from a correspondence school out of Maryland. So many stories and memories folded up for safekeeping; how like Sam to hang them all above him while he slept.