Linger

I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as them a second longer. I couldn’t stand to see the way Mom was looking back over her shoulder at me, eyebrow lifted like she was waiting for my next move. And I couldn’t stand the pain.

I rushed to my room and slammed the door hard enough that I felt everything inside me shake.

CHAPTER FORTY

• GRACE •

“Dying is a wild night and a new road.”

I had words stuck in my head instead of a song. I couldn’t remember who wrote them, only that I had heard Sam read them out loud, looking up from the book and trying out the way they sounded. I remembered the moment, even: sitting in my dad’s old office here in the house, riffling through notes for an oral presentation while Sam slouched over a book. In the comfort of that room, icy rain sliding down the windows, spoken in Sam’s soft voice, the quote had seemed innocent. Clever, maybe.

Now, in the dark, empty silence of my room, the words running feverishly through my head again and again, they seemed terrifying.

The sickness inside me was impossible to ignore now. I waited a long time for my nose to stop bleeding, using toilet paper after I ran out of tissues. It seemed like it wouldn’t ever stop. My guts were twisted inside me, my skin boiling.

All I wanted was to know what was really wrong with me. How long it would take. What it would do to me at the end. If I knew all those things, if I had something concrete to hold on to instead of the pain, I could make my peace with it.

But I didn’t have any answers.

So I could not sleep. I could not move.

I kept my eyes closed. The space beside me where Sam was supposed to be seemed huge. Before all this, when I had him with me, I would just roll over and press my face into his back when I woke up in the night. Let his breathing lull me back to sleep. But Sam wasn’t here tonight, and sleep seemed far away and irrelevant with the crawling heat inside me.

In my head, I heard Dad forbidding me to see him again. My breathing caught a little at the memory. He’d change his mind. He couldn’t mean that. I pushed my thoughts onto something else. My red coffeepot. I didn’t know if such a thing actually existed, but if it did, I was buying one. Immediately. It seemed incredibly important to make it a goal. Get some money, buy a red coffeepot, move out. Find a new place to plug it in.

I flipped onto my back and laid my hand on my stomach, trying to see if I could actually feel the rolling of stomach under my fingers. I was so hot again, and my head felt weird and floaty, disconnected from the rest of me.

The back of my mouth tasted like copper. No matter how much I swallowed, I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth.

I felt wrong.

What’s happening to me?

There was no one to ask, so I added up the clues for myself. The stomachache. The fever. Nosebleeds. Fatigue. The smell of wolf. The way the wolves had looked at me; the way Isabel had looked at me. Sam’s fingers on my arm as I left, turning to me for one last hug. They all seemed like so many good-byes.

Finally, my denial fell away.

Even though it could be just a virus. Even though it could be something serious but treatable. Even though I really had no way of knowing…

I knew.

This pain I was feeling—it was my future. A change I couldn’t control. I could dream about red coffeepots all I wanted. But my body would have the final say.

I sat up in the darkness, pushing back against the wolf inside me, tugging the blankets so they pooled in my lap. I wanted to be with Sam. The cool air bit at my cheeks and bare shoulders. I wished I were still at Beck’s house, back in Sam’s bed under his bedroom sky of birds. I swallowed down the pain, forced it deeper. If I were there now, he would wrap his arms around me and he’d tell me it would be all right, and it would be all right, at least for tonight.

I imagined myself driving back there tonight. The look on his face.

I rubbed the bare bottoms of my feet against each other. It was foolish, of course. There were a thousand reasons to stay, but…

I pushed back the barbed static in my head. Focused. Mentally made a list of what I needed. I’d get a pair of jeans from the middle drawer of my dresser and slide on a sweater and some socks. My parents wouldn’t hear. The floor didn’t creak much. It was possible. I hadn’t heard any movement upstairs for a long time now. If I didn’t turn on my car lights, they might not notice me pulling out of the driveway.

My heart was pounding now with the idea of escape.

I knew it wasn’t worth getting in more trouble with my parents, not as angry as they were. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to drive with this roar of blood in my ears, the fever trailing across my skin.

But I couldn’t really get into more trouble. They’d already forbidden me to see him. What could they do that was beyond that?

And I didn’t know how many more nights I had.

My thoughts went to Mom, scoffing over the difference between love and lust. Me walking in the woods afterward, trying to dredge up guilt for yelling at her. I thought about my dad opening my door to look for Sam. How long it had been since they had asked me where I’d been, how I was doing, if I needed anything from them.

I’d seen my parents together; they were family. They still cared about the little details in each other’s lives. I’d seen Beck, too, and the way that he knew Sam. The way he loved him. And Sam, the way he still orbited Beck’s memory like a lost satellite. That was family. My parents and me…we lived together, sometimes.

Could you outgrow your parents?

I remembered the way the wolves had watched me. Remembered wondering how much time I had. How many nights I had to spend with Sam, how many nights I was wasting here alone.

I could still taste the copper. The sickness inside me wasn’t getting any smaller. It raged, but I was still stronger than it. There were still things I had control over.

I got out of bed.

A sort of deadly calm filled me as I padded around my room, getting my jeans and underwear and shirts and two extra pairs of socks. The eye of the hurricane. I stuffed the clothes in my backpack with my homework and Sam’s beloved copy of Rilke from the bed stand. I touched the edge of my dresser, held my pillow, stood by the window where I’d once stared down a wolf. My heart hummed in my chest, expecting at any moment for my mother or my father to open the door and find me in the midst of my preparations. Surely someone would have to just feel the seriousness of what I was doing.

But nothing happened. I got my toothbrush and hairbrush from the bathroom on my way down the hall, and the house stayed silent. I hesitated by the front door, my shoes in my hand, and listened.

Nothing.

Was I really doing this?

“Good-bye,” I whispered. My hands were trembling.

The door shushed across the welcome mat as I pulled it shut behind me.

I didn’t know when I’d come back.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

• SAM •

Without Grace, I was a nocturnal animal. I stalked ants in the kitchen, waiting by the insufficient light of the recessed bulbs with a glass and a piece of paper so that I could transport them outside. I took Paul’s dusty guitar from its perch by the mantel and tuned it. First properly, then to drop D, then to DADGAD, then back to proper. In the basement, I browsed Beck’s nonfiction until I found a book on taxes and another on winning friends and influencing people and another on meditation. I stacked them into a cairn of books I never intended to read. Upstairs, in my bathroom, I sat on the tile and experimented with the right way to trim my toenails. Cupping my fingers beneath my feet only caught the flying nails half the time, and if I left them to fly where they would, I could only find half the nails on the white tile. So it was a losing battle, with fifty percent casualties either way.

Partway through the process, I heard the wolves begin to howl, loud through Beck’s bedroom window. Their songs sounded different from night to night, depending on how I felt. They could be sonorous, beautiful, a heavenly choir in heavy, wood-scented pelts. Or an eerie, lonely symphony, notes falling against one another into the night. Joyful, voices lifted, calling down the moon.

Tonight, they were a cacophonous mob, howls vying for attention, barks interspersed. Restless. A pack discordant. A pack dispersed. They usually howled like that on nights when either Beck or Paul was human, but tonight they had both their leaders. I was the only one missing.

I stood up, cold floorboards pressing up against the soles of my human feet, and went to the window. I hesitated for a moment, then flicked the lock and threw open the window. Frigid night air rushed in, but it didn’t do anything to me. I was just human. Just me.

The wolves’ howls poured in as well, surrounding me.

Do you miss me?

The disorganized cries continued, more protest than song.

I miss you guys.

And, with dull surprise, I realized that was all there was to it. I missed them. I didn’t miss it. This—this person leaning on the sash, full of human memories and fears and hopes, this person who would grow old—was who I was, and I didn’t want to lose that. I didn’t miss standing amongst them, howling. It would never compare to the feel of my fingers on the strings of my guitar. Their poignant song could never be as triumphant as the sound of me saying Grace’s name.

“Some of us are trying to sleep!” I shouted out into the darkness, which swallowed the lie.

The night went quiet. The darkness was frozen into silence; no birdcalls or rustling of leaves in this still, still night. Just the distant hiss of tires on a far-off road.

“Roooooooooooo!” I called out the window, feeling clownish as I prompted my pack.

A pause. Long enough that I realized how badly I wanted for them to need me.

Then they began to howl again, just as loud as before, their voices spilling over one another with new purpose.

I grinned.

A familiar voice behind me made me jerk; I caught myself just before I put a hand through the screen.

“I thought you were supposed to have animal cunning and the ability to hear a pin drop a mile away.”

Grace. Grace’s voice.

When I turned, she was standing in the doorway, a backpack slung on her shoulder. Her smile was…shy.

“And here I am, sneaking up on you while you—what were you doing, anyway?”

I pushed down the window and turned back around, blinking. Grace was standing here in the doorway to Beck’s bedroom. Grace, who was supposed to be home in her own bed. Grace, who haunted my thoughts when I couldn’t dream. I felt like I couldn’t be surprised. Hadn’t I known all along that she’d appear here? Hadn’t I just been waiting to find her in my doorway?

I finally regained control of my muscles and crossed the room to her. I was close enough to kiss her, but instead I reached for the dangling, loose strap of her backpack and ran my thumb along its ridged surface. The backpack’s presence answered one of my unasked questions. Another question was answered by the still-lingering wolf scent on her breath. And the host of other questions I wanted to ask—Do you know what will happen when they find out? Do you know this will change everything? Are you all right with how they will see you? How they will see me?—had already been answered “yes” by Grace, or she wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t have set a foot outside her bedroom door without thinking through everything.