Linger

“That she was in Duluth. That she was coming home soon!” John threw his hands up. “I didn’t know whether I should crap myself or scream at the computer. How could she do this to Mom and Dad? And then she’s just like, ‘So I’m coming back soon’? Like she just went off to visit friends and now she’s done. I mean, I’m really happy, but, Grace, I’m so angry at her.”

He sat back in his seat, looking a little surprised that he’d confessed so much. I crossed my arms and leaned on the table, trying to override the prickle of jealousy that had unexpectedly surfaced when John had said Grace’s name with such a feeling of connection. Strange what love taught you about your faults.

“But when?” Grace pressed. “When did she say she would get back?”

John shrugged. “Of course she didn’t say anything other than ‘soon.’”

Grace’s eyes shone. “But she’s alive.”

“Yeah,” John said, and now I saw that his eyes were rather shiny as well. “The cops told us that—you know, that we shouldn’t keep our hopes up—anyway. That was the worst, not knowing if she was alive.”

“Speaking of the cops,” Isabel said. “Did you show them the e-mail?”

Grace briefly turned a less-than-pleasant face to Isabel, but it had melted back into gentle interest by the time John turned back to her.

He looked guilty. “I didn’t want them to tell me about how it might not be real. I guess—I guess I will. Because they can track it, right?”

“Yes,” Isabel said, looking at Grace instead of at John. “I’ve heard cops can track IP addresses or whatever they’re called. So they could find out the general area it was coming from. Like maybe even right here in Mercy Falls.”

In a hard voice, Grace replied, “But if it was from an Internet café from a pretty big city, like Duluth or Minneapolis, it wouldn’t really be useful.”

John interrupted, “I don’t know if I really want to have Olivia dragged back here, kicking and screaming. I mean, she’s almost eighteen, and she’s not stupid. I miss her, but there had to be some reason for her to go.”

We all stared at him—for different reasons, I think. I was just thinking that it was an awfully perceptive and selfless thing to say, if slightly uninformed. Isabel’s stare looked more like an are-you-a-total-idiot? stare. Grace’s was admiring.

“You’re a pretty good brother,” Grace said.

John looked down into his coffee cup. “Yeah, well, I don’t know about that. Anyway, I’d better get going. I’m just on my way to class.”

“Class on Saturday?”

“Workshop stuff,” John said. “Extra credit. Gets me out of the house.” He slid out of the booth, pulling a few bucks out of his pocket for the coffee. “Would you give this to the waitress?”

“Yup,” Grace said. “See you around?”

John nodded and retreated. He had only been out of the diner for a moment when Isabel slid back into the center to face Grace.

“Wow, Grace, you never told me you were born without a brain,” Isabel said. “Because that’s the only way I can figure you would do something that incredibly stupid.”

I wouldn’t have put it in those terms, but I was thinking the same thing.

Grace waved it off. “Psh. I sent it the last time I was in Duluth. I wanted to give them some hope. And I actually thought it might keep the cops from looking so hard for her if they thought it was an annoying almost-legal runaway instead of a possible homicide-kidnapping thing. See, I was using my brain.”

Isabel shook some granola into her palm. “Well, I think you should stay out of it. Sam, tell her to stay out of it.”

The whole idea of it did make me uneasy, but I said, “Grace is very wise.”

“Grace is very wise,” Grace repeated to Isabel.

“Generally,” I added.

“Maybe we should tell him,” Grace said.

Isabel and I both stared at her.

“What? He’s her brother. He loves her and wants her to be happy. Plus, I don’t understand all the secrecy if it’s scientific. Yeah, the greater world would definitely take it the wrong way. But family members? You’d think they’d be better about it, if it’s just logical instead of monstrous.”

I didn’t really have words for the horror that the idea inspired in me. I wasn’t even sure why it elicited such a strong reaction.

“Sam,” Isabel said, and I realized I was just sitting there, running a finger over one of my scarred wrists. Isabel looked at Grace. “Grace, that is the dumbest idea I have ever heard, unless your goal is to get Olivia rushed to the nearest microscope for poking and prodding. Also, John is clearly too highly strung to handle the concept.”

This, at least, made sense to me. I nodded. “I don’t think he’s a good one to tell, Grace.”

“You told Isabel!”

“We had to,” I said, before Isabel could finish looking superior. “She had already guessed a lot of it. I think we should operate on a need-to-know basis.” Grace was starting to get her blank face, which meant that she was annoyed, so I said, “But I still think you’re very wise. Generally.”

“Generally,” repeated Isabel. “Now I’m getting out of here. I’m, like, sticking fast to the booth.”

“Isabel,” I said, as she got up, and she stopped at the end of the table, giving me this weird look, as if I hadn’t called her by her name before. “I’m going to bury him. The wolf. Maybe today, if the ground’s not frozen.”

“No hurry,” Isabel said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

As Grace leaned in toward me, I caught another whiff of the rotten smell. I wished I’d looked more closely at the photo on Isabel’s phone. I wished the nature of the wolf’s death had been more straightforward. I’d had enough mysteries for a lifetime.

CHAPTER EIGHT

• SAM •

I was human.

The day after I buried the wolf was frigid, Minnesota March in all its volatile splendor: One day the temperatures would soar into the thirties, and the next it would be barely twelve or thirteen degrees. It was amazing how warm thirty-two felt after two solid months of single digits. I’d never had to endure such cold in my human skin. Today was one of the bitterly cold days, as far away from spring as you could get. Except for the brilliant red winterberries that clustered at the edges of the trees, there was no color left anywhere in the world. My breath frosted in front of me, and my eyes dried with the cold. The air smelled like being a wolf, and yet I wasn’t.

The knowledge both thrilled and hurt me.

There’d only been two customers in the bookstore all day. I considered what I’d do after my shift. Most times, if my shift ended before Grace was done with school, I would linger in the loft of the store with a book rather than go home to the Brisbanes’ empty house. Without Grace there, it was just a place to wait for her, a dull ache inside me.

Today, the ache had followed me to work. I had already written a song—just a piece of a song—Is it still a secret if nobody cares I if having the knowledge in no way impairs I your living—and feeling—the way that you breathe I knowing the things that you know about me—the hope of a song more than anything else. Now, I perched behind the counter reading a copy of Roethke, my shift about to end and Grace tutoring until late, my eyes drawn to the tiny flakes of snow drifting outside instead of Roethke’s words: “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?” I looked down at my fingers on the pages of my book, such wonderful, precious things, and felt guilty for the nameless wanting that plagued me.

The clock ticked to five. This was when I usually locked the front door, turned the sign to CLOSED—COME BACK SOON, and went out the back door to my Volkswagen.

But this time I didn’t. This time I locked the back door, picked up my guitar case, and went out the front, sliding a little on the ice coating the threshold. I pulled on the skullcap that Grace had bought me in a failed attempt to make me look sexy while keeping my head warm. Stepping out into the middle of the sidewalk, I watched tiny flakes float down onto the abandoned street. As far as I could see, there were banks of old snow pressed into stained sculptures. Icicles made jagged smiles of the storefronts.

My eyes smarted with the cold. I held my free hand out, palm up, and watched as snow dissolved on my skin.

This was not real life. This was life as watched through a window. Life watched on television. I couldn’t remember when I hadn’t hidden from this.

I was cold, I had a handful of snow, and I was human.

The future stretched before me, infinite and growing and mine, in a way that nothing had ever been before.

Sudden euphoria rushed through me, a grin stretching my face at this cosmic lottery I had won. I had risked everything and gained everything, and here I was, of the world and in it. I laughed out loud, no one to hear me but the audience of snowflakes. I leaped off the sidewalk, into the bank of graying snow. I was drunk with the reality of my human body. A lifetime of winters, of skullcaps, of collars turned against cold, of noses turning red, of staying up late on New Year’s Eve. Skidding in the slick tire tracks in the road, I waltzed across the street, swinging my guitar case in a circle, snow falling all around me, until a car honked at me.

I waved at the driver and jumped up onto the opposite sidewalk, knocking the crisp snow off each parking meter as I came to it. My pants were frozen with snow stuffed into my shoes, my fingers numb and red, and still I was me. Always me.

I circled the block until the cold had lost its novelty, and then I doubled back to my car and checked my watch. Grace would still be tutoring, and I didn’t feel like running the risk of getting to her house and finding one of her parents instead. Awkward didn’t begin to describe those conversations. The more obvious Grace and I became with our relationship, the less her parents found to say to me. And vice versa. So instead I headed toward Beck’s house. Even though I couldn’t hope for any of the other wolves to have shifted, I could pick up some of my books. I wasn’t a fan of the mysteries that filled Grace’s bookshelves.

So I followed the highway in the dying gray light of day, Boundary Wood pressing up against the shoulder of the road, until I was on the deserted street that led to Beck’s.

Pulling into the empty driveway, I climbed out of the car and took a deep breath. The woods here smelled different than the woods behind Grace’s did—here, the air was filled with the sharp, wintergreen scent of the birches and the complex smell of wet earth near the lake. I could pick out the scent of the pack, too, musky and pungent.

Habit led me to the back door, the fresh snow squeaking beneath my boots, clumping at the cuff of my jeans. I dragged my fingertips through the snow on top of the bushes that grew against the house, as I walked around back and waited again for the surge of nausea that meant I was about to change. But it didn’t come.