Linger

I wanted Grace to wait inside, but she insisted on coming along. She watched us from among the trees, arms folded tightly across her chest, eyes red.

I had chosen this site, sloped and sparse, because of its beauty in summer; when it rained, the leaves flipped up to reveal glowing white undersides that rippled in the wind. However, I had never been human here to appreciate its equally beautiful presence this time of year. While we dug, the evening transformed the woods, making ribbons of warm sunlight across the forest floor and painting stripes of blue shadows over our bodies. Everything was splashes of yellow and indigo, an impressionist painting of three teens at an evening funeral.

Cole had transformed yet again from the guy I’d seen last. When I handed off the shovel to him, we exchanged glances. And for the first time since I’d met him, his expression wasn’t empty. When our eyes met, I saw pain and guilt…and Cole.

Finally, Cole.

Victor’s body lay a few feet away from us, partially wrapped in a sheet. In my head, I came up with lyrics for him as I dug.

Sailing to an island unknown

Failing to find your way home

you walk under a sea

leagues beneath us

Grace caught my eye, as if she knew what I was doing. The lyrics could also be about her, so I shoved them out of my mind. Digging and waiting to dig. That was what I thought about as the sun crept down.

When the grave was deep enough, we both hesitated. From here, I could see Victor’s belly and the blast that had killed him. In the end, he died as an animal.

It could have so easily been Beck’s or Paul’s body that Culpeper pulled out of the back of his truck. Last year, it could have been me. It was almost me.

• GRACE •

Cole couldn’t do it.

When the grave was finally dug and he was finally standing by Sam and looking down at the body next to the pit, I saw that Cole couldn’t do it. I recognized the veneer of control as he stood, his breaths ragged enough to make his body sway with each exhalation.

I’d been there.

“Cole,” I said, and both Sam’s head and Cole’s jerked toward me. They had to look down, because I had long before gotten too tired to stand. From my place in the cold, dry leaves, I gestured toward Victor. “Why don’t you say something? I mean, to Victor.”

Sam blinked at me, surprised. I think maybe he’d forgotten that I’d already had to say good-bye to him once. I knew how it felt.

Cole didn’t look at either of us. He pressed his knuckles to his forehead and swallowed. “I can’t, um…” He stopped, because his voice was unsteady. I saw his throat move as he swallowed again.

We were making it harder for him. We were making him fight both grief and tears.

Sam picked up on this, and said, “We can go if you want some privacy.”

“Please don’t,” Cole whispered.

His face was still dry, but a tear, cold against my hot cheek, streaked off my chin.

Sam waited a long moment for Cole to speak, and when he didn’t, Sam recited a poem, his voice low and formal, “Death arrives among all that sound, like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it…” I watched Cole go completely still as Sam spoke. Still like not moving. Not breathing. A sort of still so deep you know it went all the way through him.

Sam took a step toward Cole and then, carefully, he put a hand on Cole’s shoulder.

“This isn’t Victor. This is something Victor wore, for a little while. Not anymore.”

They both looked at the body of the wolf, stiff and small and defeated-looking in death.

Cole sank to the ground.

• COLE •

I had to look at his eyes.

I uncovered the body so there was nothing between me and Victor’s brown eyes. They were empty and faraway, ghosts of his real eyes.

The cold shook my shoulders, a soft threat of what was to come, but I pushed it away, out of my head. I looked into his eyes and tried to pretend that there was no wolf around them.

I remembered the day I’d asked Victor if he wanted to start a band with me. We were in his room, which was one part bed and three parts drum kit, and he was slamming out a solo. The echo was so loud in the small room that it sounded like there were three drummers. His poster frames jittered on the walls and his alarm clock was slowly jerking toward the edge of his bedside table. Victor’s eyes were shining with manic fervor, and he made a crazy face at me every time he kicked the bass drum.

I could barely hear Angie’s shout from the next room. “Vic, you’re making my ears bleed! Cole, shut that stupid door!”

I shut Victor’s bedroom door behind me.

“Sounds hot,” I told him.

Victor tossed me one of his drumsticks. It arced past my head, and I had to jerk to catch it. I took a whack at his cymbals.

“Victor!” howled Angie.

He called, “These are magic hands!”

“One day, people will pay for the privilege of listening!” I shouted back.

Victor grinned at me and did a fast run with just one stick and the bass drum.

I smashed the cymbal again to piss Angie off and turned to Victor.

“What’s up?” Victor asked. He pounded at the drums again, smacking his stick off the one I held in my hand in the middle of the run.

“So you ready to do this thing?” I asked him.

Victor lowered his drumstick. His eyes were steady on me. “What?”

“NARKOTIKA,” I said.

Now, in this freezing cold wind, the sun disappearing, I reached out and touched the fur on Victor’s shoulder. I said, my voice gravelly and uneven, “I came here to get away. I came here to forget everything. I thought…I thought I didn’t have anything to lose.”

The wolf lay there, small and gray and dark in the failing light. Dead. I had to keep looking at his eyes. I wouldn’t let myself forget that this was not a wolf. This was Victor.

“And it really worked, Victor.” I shook my head. “You know it, don’t you? It’s all gone when you’re a wolf. It’s just what I wanted. It is so, so good. It’s absolute nothing. I could be a wolf right now, and I wouldn’t remember this. It would be like it never happened. I wouldn’t care if you were dead, because I wouldn’t even remember who you were.”

Out of the corner of my field of vision, I saw Sam turn his face away from me. I was profoundly aware of him not looking at me, not looking at Grace.

I closed my eyes.

“All…this…pain. This…” My voice was failing me again, suddenly dangerously unsteady. But I wouldn’t let myself stop. I opened my eyes. “Guilt. Because of what I’ve done to you. Because of what I’ve always done to you. It would—it would be gone.” I stopped, rubbed my hand across my face. My voice was nearly inaudible. “But that’s what I always do, isn’t it, Vic? Screw things up and then make myself disappear?”

I reached out and touched one of the wolf’s front paws; the fur was coarse and cold beneath my fingertips. “Ah, Vic,” I said, and my voice caught in my throat. “You were so good. Magic hands.” He’d never have hands again.

I didn’t say the next part out loud. Never again, Victor. I’m done running. I’m sorry this is what it took for me to see.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something, the darkness shifting.

Wolves.

As a human, I had never seen so many of them, but now, the dark spaces between the trees seethed with them. Ten? A dozen? They were far enough away that I could almost believe I was imagining the dim shapes.

Grace’s eyes were on them, too. “Sam,” she whispered. “Beck.”

“I know,” he said.

We were all frozen, waiting to see how long the wolves would stay, and if they would come any closer. Crouched there beside Victor, I was aware that the glinting eyes meant something different to each of us. Sam’s past. My present. Grace’s future.

“Are they here for Victor?” Sam asked, voice soft.

Nobody answered him.

I realized: I was the only one mourning Victor for who he really was.

The wolves remained where they were, specters in the oncoming night. Finally, Sam turned to me and asked, “Are you ready?”

I didn’t think it was something you could be ready for, but I covered Victor’s face with the sheet. Together, Sam and I hefted his weight—it felt like nothing between us—and gently lowered him into the grave, with Grace and the pack as our audience.

The woods were utterly silent.

Then Grace stood up, finally, unsteady on her feet, one of her hands pressed to her stomach.

Sam startled as one of the wolves began to croon. It was a low, sad sound, far more like a human voice than I thought possible.

One by one, the other wolves added their voices; as the evening grew darker, the song swelled, filling every crevice and gully in the forest. It prickled some wolf memory, buried deep in my mind, of me tipping my head back to the sky, calling the spring.

The lonely song drove home the fact of Victor’s cold body in the grave like nothing else, and I realized that my cheeks were wet as I lowered my face to my palms.

Lowering my hands, I saw Sam cross the few steps to Grace and hold her swaying form.

Holding tight, denying the fact that eventually we all had to let go.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

• SAM •

When we got back inside, it was hard to tell who looked worse—Cole, so racked with grief, or Grace, her eyes looking huge in her pale, pale face. It hurt to look at both of them.

Cole sank down into one of the chairs at the dining room table. I led Grace to the couch and sat next to her, meaning to turn on the radio, to talk to her, to do something, but I was all used up. So we all sat in silence, lost in our thoughts.

An hour later, when we heard the back door come open, all of us jerked, relaxing only a little when we saw that it was Isabel, bundled in her white, fur-lined jacket and her usual boots. Her eyes slid from Cole sitting at the table, his head on his crossed arms, to me, and then finally to Grace, who lay against my chest.

“Your father was here,” I said, stupidly, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“I know. I saw, after it was too late. I didn’t know he was going to bring it here.” Isabel’s arms were held tightly to her sides. “You should’ve heard him crowing when he got back. I couldn’t get away until after dinner; I told him I was going to the library, because if there’s one thing that man doesn’t know, it’s the hours the library is open.” She paused, half turning her head back toward Cole’s still-motionless form and then back to me. “Who was it? The wolf, I mean.”

I glanced toward the dining room table, just visible from where we were on the couch. I knew he could hear us. “It was Victor. Cole’s friend.”

Isabel jerked her attention back to Cole. “I didn’t realize he had any…” She seemed to realize how awful that sounded, because she added, “Here.”

“Yes,” I said emphatically.

She looked uncertain, glancing back at Cole and then back at us. Finally, she said, “I came to see what the plan was.”

“Plan?” I asked. “For what?”