It had just been me, picking up his coat and countless shirts from the ground, knocking the bulk of the gritty snow from them, throwing the lot of them in the back of the Escort. Allowing myself one good door slam. Then linking my arms behind my head and turning away from the road and the car. Because the loss of Beck had not yet begun to sting. The fact that I was stranded by the road, on the other hand, had sunk in immediately.
Grace made a quiet, sad noise, sorry for that Sam long ago, though it took that Sam a long time to realize what he’d really lost in those few minutes.
“I was there for a while, staring at all the useless junk in the back — like, Ulrik had a hockey mask in the trunk, and it kept on looking at me like You’re an idiot, Sam Roth. And then I heard this car pull up behind me — I totally forgot about this part until just now, Grace — and who do you think stopped to see if I needed help?”
Grace rubbed her nose on my shirt. “I don’t know. Who?”
“Tom Culpeper,” I said.
“No!” Grace pulled back so that she could look at me. “Really?” Now she looked more like herself in the dim light, her hair mussed from lying on my chest and her eyes more alive, and my hand that rested on her waist wanted desperately to slide inside her shirt to map a course up the dip of her spine, to touch her shoulder blades and make her think only of me.
But it wasn’t a bridge I would start across by myself. I didn’t know where we stood. I was good at waiting.
“Yes,” I said, instead of kissing her. “Yes, it was Tom Culpeper.”
Grace lay back down on my chest. “That’s crazy.”
“You’re Geoffrey Beck’s kid,” Tom Culpeper had observed. Even in the dim light, I had seen that his SUV was crusted with ice and sand and salt — snirt, Ulrik always called it, a combination of snow and dirt — and that the headlights cast a crooked path of light across me and the Escort. He had added, after some thought, “Sam, right? Looks like you need a hand.”
I remembered thinking at the time how relieving it was to hear my name said in such an ordinary voice, to wipe out the memory of how Beck had said it as he’d shifted.
“He helped me out,” I said. “He seemed different then, I guess. That must’ve been soon after they moved here.”
“Did he have Isabel with him?” Grace asked.
“I don’t remember Isabel.” I considered. “I try really hard not to think of him as evil, Grace. Because of Isabel. I don’t know what I would have thought of him, if not for the wolves.”
“If not for the wolves,” Grace said, “neither of us would’ve given him any thought at all.”
“This story was supposed to have bacon in it,” I admitted. “It was supposed to make you laugh.”
She sighed heavily, like the weight of the world had crushed the breath out of her, and I knew how she felt.
“That’s okay. Turn off the lights,” she replied, reaching down to tug the comforter over both of us where we lay. She smelled faintly like wolf, and I didn’t think she’d make it all the way through the night without shifting. “I’m ready for today to be over.”
Feeling far less sleepy than before, I dropped my arm off the side of the bed to pull the plug out of the wall. The room went dark and, after a moment, Grace whispered that she loved me, sounding a little sad. I wrapped my arms tightly around her shoulders, sorry that loving me was such a complicated thing.
Her breaths were already slowing as I whispered it back to her. But I didn’t sleep. I stayed awake, thinking of Tom Culpeper and Beck, how the truth of them seemed so buried inside. I kept seeing Culpeper walking across the snow toward me, his nose already red from the cold, perfectly willing to help a boy he didn’t know change a tire in the freezing evening. And between repeated flashes of that image, I kept seeing the wolves plunging out of the morning to shove my small body to the ground, to change my life forever.
Beck had done that. Beck had decided to take me. Long before my parents decided they didn’t want me, he had planned to take me. They had just made it easy for him.
I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had.
I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?
In the middle of the night, Grace woke up, her eyes wide, her body shuddering. She said my name, just like Beck had said it all those years ago by the side of the road, and then, like Beck, she left me with nothing but an empty suit of clothing and one thousand unanswered questions.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ISABEL
Sam’s cell phone called me at seven A.M. the next morning. Normally I would’ve been getting ready for school at seven A.M., but it was a weekend, which meant that instead I was lying on my bed, pulling on my running shoes. I ran because I was vain and it gave me great legs.
I flipped open the phone. “Hello?” I wasn’t sure what I expected.
“I knew it,” Cole said. “I knew you’d pick up the phone if you thought it was Sam.”
“Oh my God. Are you for real?”
“I am for very real. Can I come inside?”
I jumped off my bed and went to the window, peering around. I could just see the edge of a rather ugly station wagon at the end of the driveway.
“Is that you in that perv-mobile?”
“It smells,” Cole said. “I would invite you to come out here and talk to me in the privacy of the car, but it’s pretty powerful stuff, whatever is making it smell.”
“What do you want, Cole?”
“Your credit card. I need to order a fishing net, some hardware, and a couple of tranquilizers that I swear are totally over-the-counter. Also, I need them overnighted.”
“Tell me you’re just trying to be funny.”
“I told Sam I could catch Beck. I’m going to build a pit trap using the pit Grace helpfully found by falling into it and bait it with Beck’s favorite food, which he helpfully recorded in his journal while telling an anecdote about a kitchen fire.”
“You are trying to be funny. Because otherwise, this sounds like an insane person on the telephone.”
“Scent is the strongest tie to memory.”
I sighed and lay back down on my bed, phone still at my ear. “What does this have to do with keeping you all from being killed by my father?”
There was a pause. “Beck moved the wolves once before. I want to ask him about it.”
“And a fishing net, some hardware, and drugs will help you to do that?”
“If not, it’s all the makings of a very good time.”
I stared at the ceiling. Long ago, Jack had thrown Silly Putty at the place where the ceiling tipped to meet the roof-slanted wall, and it still stuck there.
I sighed. “Fine, Cole, fine. I’ll meet you at the side door, by the little stairs you went up before. Park that thing someplace my parents won’t see when they wake up. And don’t be loud.”
“I’m never loud,” Cole said, and the phone went silent in my hand at the same time my bedroom door opened.
Still lying on my back, I looked upside down to the door and was unsurprised to see Cole letting himself in. He shut the door carefully behind him. He was wearing cargo pants and a plain black T-shirt. He looked famous, but I was beginning to realize that was a function of the way he stood, not of what he wore. In my room, which was all floating, light fabrics and pillows that shone and mirrors that smiled back at you, Cole looked out of place, but I was beginning to figure out that that, too, was a function of how he was, not where he was.
“So today you’re Cross-Country Barbie,” he said. I remembered I was in my running shoes and shorts. He walked to my dresser and sprayed a puff of my perfume into the air. A Cole in the dresser mirror waved his hand through the mist.
“Today I’m Humor-Free Barbie,” I replied. Cole picked up my rosary from the dresser, his thumb over one of the beads. The way he held it made it look like a familiar gesture, though it was hard to imagine Cole St. Clair entering a church without catching fire. “I thought that side door was locked.”
“Not so much.”
I closed my eyes. Looking at him was making me feel … tired. I felt the same weight inside me that I’d felt at Il Pomodoro. I thought, possibly, that what I really needed was to go where nobody knew me and start over again, with none of my previous decisions, conversations, or expectations coming with me.
The bed sighed as Cole climbed onto it and lay on his back beside me. He smelled clean, like shaving cream and the beach, and I realized he must have taken special care before he came over here today. That made me feel weird, too.
I closed my eyes again. “How is Grace doing? About Olivia?”
“I wouldn’t know. She shifted last night so we locked her in the bathroom.”
“I wasn’t friends with Olivia,” I said. It seemed important for him to know. “I didn’t know her, really.”
“Me neither.” Cole paused. He said, in a different voice, “I like Grace.”
He said it like it were a very serious thing, and for a moment, I thought he meant it as “I like Grace” which I couldn’t even properly comprehend. But then he clarified. “I like how she is with Sam. I don’t think I ever believed in love, not really. Just thought it was something James Bond made up, a long time ago, to get laid.”
We lay there, not speaking, for a few more minutes. Outside, birds were waking up. The house was silent; the morning was not cold enough to trip the heater. It was hard to not think about Cole lying right there beside me, even if he was quiet, especially since he smelled good and I could remember exactly what it felt like to kiss him. I could remember, too, exactly the last time I’d seen Sam kiss Grace, and I remembered, more than anything, the way Sam’s hand looked, pressing against her as they kissed. I didn’t think that was what it looked like when Cole and I had kissed. Thinking about it was making it get all loud and crowded inside me again, the wanting Cole and the doubting that it was the right thing to want him. I felt guilty, dirty, euphoric, as if I had already given in.
“Cole, I’m tired,” I said. As soon as I said it, I had no idea why I had.
He didn’t reply. He just lay there, quieter than I thought he could be.
Irritated by his silence, I battled whether or not I should ask him if he’d heard me.
Finally, in a quiet so deep that I heard his lips part before he spoke, he said, “Sometimes, I think about calling home.”
I was used to Cole being self-centered, but this, I felt, was a new low in our relationship, him hijacking my confession with one of his own.
He said, “I think that I’ll just call home and tell my mom that I’m not dead. I think I’ll call my dad and ask him if he’d like to have a little chat about what meningitis does to you on a cellular level. Or I think I’ll call Jeremy — he was my bassist — and I’ll tell him that I’m not dead, but I don’t want to be looked for anymore. To tell my parents that I’m not dead but I’m never coming home.” He was quiet for such a long time then that I thought he was done. He was quiet long enough that I could see the morning light in my airy, pastel room get a little brighter as the mist began to burn off.