chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
• GRACE •
I found Sam leaning on the front porch railing, a long, dark form barely visible in the night. It was funny how Sam, with just the curve of his shoulders and the way he ducked his chin, could convey so much emotion. Even for someone like me, someone who thought a smile was a smile was a smile, it was easy to see the frustration and sadness in the line of his back, the bend of his left knee, the way one of his slender feet was rolled on its side.
I felt suddenly shy, as uncertain and excited as I had been the first time I met him.
Without turning on the front light, I joined him at the railing, not sure of what to say. I felt like I wanted to jump up and down and grab him around the neck and punch his chest and grin like a crazy person or cry. I wasn’t sure what the protocol for this was.
Sam turned to me, and in the dim light from the window, I saw that there was stubble on his chin. While I was gone, he had gotten older. I reached up and scrubbed his stubble with my hand, and he smiled ruefully.
“Does that hurt?” I asked. I rubbed his stubble against the grain. I’d missed touching him.
“Why would it?”
“Because it’s going the wrong way?” I suggested. I was overwhelmingly happy to be standing here, my hand on his unshaven cheek. Everything was terrible, but everything was fine, too. I wanted to be smiling, and I thought my eyes probably already were, because he was sort of smiling, too, a puzzled one, like he wasn’t certain if that was what he meant to do.
“Also,” I said, “hi.”
Sam did smile then, and said softly, “Hey, angel.” He put his lanky arms around my neck in a fierce hug, and I wrapped mine around his chest to squeeze him as hard as I could. I loved to kiss Sam, but no kiss could ever be as wonderful as this. Just his breath against my hair and my ear smashed up against his T-shirt. It felt like together, we were a sturdier creature, Grace-and-Sam.
Still locking me in his arms, Sam asked, “Did you eat something yet?”
“A bread sandwich. I also found some clogs. Not to eat.”
Sam laughed softly. I was so glad to hear it, so hungry to hear him. He said, “We aren’t very good at shopping.”
Into his shirt — he smelled like fabric softener — I mumbled, “I don’t like grocery shopping. It’s the same thing over and over every week. I’d like to make enough money, one day, that someone else would do it for me. Do you have to be rich for that? I don’t want a fancy house. Just someone else to do the shopping.”
Sam considered. He hadn’t loosened his hold on me yet. “I think you always have to do your own shopping.”
“I’ll bet the Queen doesn’t shop for herself.”
He blew a breath out over the top of my hair. “But she always eats the same thing every day. Eel jellies and haddock sandwiches and scones with Marmite.”
“I don’t think you even know what Marmite is,” I said.
“It’s something you put on bread and it’s disgusting. That’s what Beck told me.” Sam pulled his arms free and leaned on the railing instead. He eyed me. “Are you cold?”
It took me a moment to realize the implication: Will you shift?
But I felt good, real, firmly me. I shook my head and joined him at the railing. For a moment we just stood there in the darkness and looked out into the night. When I glanced over at Sam, I saw that his hands were knotted together. The fingers of his right hand squeezed his left thumb so tightly that it was white and bloodless.
I leaned my head against his shoulder, just his T-shirt between my cheek and his skin. At my touch, Sam sighed — not an unhappy sigh — and said, “I think those are the northern lights.”
I shifted my gaze without lifting my head. “Where?”
“Over there. Above the trees. See? Where it’s sort of pink.”
I squinted. There were a million stars. “Or it could be the lights from the gas station. You know, that QuikMart outside of town.”
“That’s a depressing and practical thought,” Sam said. “I’d rather it was something magical.”
“The aurora borealis isn’t any more magical than the QuikMart,” I pointed out. I had done a paper on it once, so I was more aware of its science than I might have otherwise been. Though I had to admit that I did find the idea of solar wind and atoms playing together to create a light show for us a little magical anyway.
“That’s also a depressing and practical thought.”
I lifted my head and shifted to look at him instead. “They’re still beautiful.”
“Unless it really is the QuikMart,” Sam said. He looked at me then, in a pensive way that made me feel a little fidgety. He said, reluctantly, as if suddenly remembering his manners, “Are you tired? I’ll go back in with you, if that’s what you want.”
“I’m not tired,” I said. “I want to just be with you for a while. Before everything gets difficult and confusing.”
He frowned off into the night. Then, all in a rush, he said, “Let’s go see if those really are the northern lights.”
“You have an airplane?”
“I have a Volkswagen,” he replied valiantly. “We would have to get someplace darker. Farther away from the QuikMart. Into the wilds of Minnesota. You want to?”
And now he had the shy little grin on his face that I loved. It felt like ages since I had seen it.
I asked, “Do you have your keys?”
He patted his pocket.
I gestured upstairs. “What about Cole?”
“He’s sleeping, like everyone else at this time of night,” Sam said. I didn’t tell him that Cole wasn’t sleeping. He saw my hesitation and mistook the meaning of it. “You’re the practical one. Is it a bad idea? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”
“I want to go,” I said. I reached down and took his hand firmly. “We won’t be gone long.”
Getting into the Volkswagen in the dark driveway, the car rumbling to life, it felt like we were conspiring to something greater than just chasing lights in the sky. We could be going anywhere. Chasing the promise of magic. Sam turned up the heat all the way while I moved my seat back — someone had moved it all the way forward. Reaching over the center console, Sam briefly squeezed my hand before grabbing the gearshift and backing out of the driveway.
“Ready?”
I grinned at him. For the first time since the hospital, since before the hospital, I felt like the old Grace, the one who could do anything she put her mind to. “I was born ready.”
We raced down the street. Sam reached over to brush the top of my ear with his finger; the action made him send the car slightly crooked. Looking hurriedly back to the road, he laughed at himself, just a little, as he straightened the wheel.
“Watch out the window,” he said. “Since I can’t seem to remember how to drive. Tell me where to go. Where it’s brightest. I’m trusting you.”
I pressed my face against the window and squinted at the hint of lights in the sky. At first, it was hard to tell which direction the lights were coming from, so I just directed Sam down the darkest roads first, farthest away from house lights and town. And now, as the minutes passed, it became easier to find a path north. Every turn took us farther away from Beck’s house, farther away from Mercy Falls, farther away from Boundary Wood. And then, suddenly, we were miles away from our real lives, driving down a straight-arrow road under a wide, wide sky punched through with hundreds of millions of stars, and the world was vast around us. On a night like tonight, it wasn’t hard to believe that, not so long ago, people could see by starlight alone.
“In 1859,” I said, “there was a solar storm that made the northern lights so strong, people could read by them.”
Sam didn’t doubt my facts. “Why do you know this?”
“Because it’s interesting,” I said.
His smile was back. The little amused one that meant that he was charmed by my overdeveloped left brain. “Tell me something else interesting.”
“The auroras were so strong that telegraph people shut off their batteries and ran their telegraphs by the power of the auroras instead,” I said.
“They did not,” Sam said, but it was clear that he believed me. “Tell me something else interesting.”
I reached over to touch his hand where it rested on the gearshift. When I ran my thumb over the inside of his wrist, I felt goose bumps raise underneath my fingers. My fingertips found his scar, the skin unnaturally smooth, the edges still puckered and lumpy.
“I can’t feel anything on my scar,” he said. “It’s got no sensation in it.”
I briefly closed my hand around his wrist, thumb pressed tightly into his skin. I could feel the flutter of his pulse. “We could keep going,” I said.
Sam was silent, and at first I thought he didn’t understand what I meant. But then I saw him working his hands on the steering wheel. By the light of the dashboard, I saw that he still had mud underneath the nails of his right hand. Unlike me, he hadn’t left his dirty skin behind.
I asked him, “What are you thinking?”
His voice sounded sticky when he replied, like he had to dislodge the words to get them out. “That this time last year, I wouldn’t have wanted to.” Sam swallowed. “I was thinking that now, if we could, I would. Can you imagine it?”
I could. I could imagine a life someplace far away, starting over from scratch, just us. But as soon as I pictured it — Sam’s socks draped over a window radiator, my books spread across a tiny kitchen table, dirty coffee mugs upside down in the sink — I thought of what I would leave behind: Rachel and Isabel and Olivia and, finally, my parents. I had left them so conclusively, through the dubious miracle of my shift, that my old anger at them felt dull and remote. They had no power over my future now. Nothing did, except for the weather.
Then, suddenly, out Sam’s window, I saw the aurora, clear and bright, obviously not a reflection of any store’s lights. “Sam, Sam! Look! Turn, turn, turn, go that way!”
Twisting slowly in the sky above to our left was a sinuous, shaggy ribbon of pink. It pulsed and brightened like a living thing. Sam pulled a left at a narrow, barely paved road that led through an unending black field. The car dipped through potholes and weaved, loose gravel rattling behind us. My teeth snapped as we went over a bump. Sam made an ahhhhhhhhh sound so that his voice modulated crazily with the jolting vibration of the Volkswagen.
“Stop here!” I ordered.
The field rolled out for acres in every direction. Sam pulled up the parking brake and together we peered out the windshield.
Hanging in the sky directly above us was the aurora borealis. Like a brilliant pink road, it snaked through the air and disappeared behind the trees, a darker purple aura clinging to one side of it. The lights shimmered and stretched, growing and receding, striving and shrinking. One moment the light was a singular thing, a path to heaven, the next moment it was a collection of many, an army made of light, marching ever northward.
“Do you want to get out?” Sam asked. My hand was already on the door handle. Outside, the air was cold enough to have teeth to it, but I was fine, for now. I joined Sam at the front of the car, where he leaned on the hood. When I leaned back on my hands next to him, the hood was hot from the engine, a buffer against the cool night.
Together we gazed up. The flat black field around us made the sky as big as an ocean. With the wolf inside me and Sam beside me, both of us strange creatures, I felt we were somehow an intrinsic part of this world, this night, this boundless mystery. My heart thumped faster, for a reason I couldn’t pinpoint. I was suddenly very aware that Sam was just inches away from me, watching with me, his breaths visible in front of his face.
“This close, it is so hard to believe,” I said, and my voice caught for some reason on believe, “that it isn’t magic.”
Sam kissed me.
His kiss landed sort of on the side of my mouth because my face was still turned up, but it was a real kiss, not a careful one. I turned toward him so that we could kiss again, properly. My lips were hot with the unfamiliar feeling of his stubble and when he touched my arm, I was hyperaware of the rough calluses on his fingertips against my skin. Everything inside me felt raw-edged and hungry. I couldn’t understand how something we’d done so many times could feel so strange and new and terrifying.
When we kissed, it didn’t matter that I had been a wolf hours ago, or that I would be a wolf again. It didn’t matter that a thousand snares were laid for us as soon as we left this moment. All that mattered was this: our noses touching, the softness of his mouth, the ache inside me.
Sam pulled away to press his face into my neck. He remained there, hugging me fiercely. His arms were tight enough around me to constrict my breathing, and my hip bone was pressed against the hood hard enough to hurt, but I would never, ever tell him to let me go.
Sam said something, but his voice was inaudible against my skin.
“What?” I asked.
He released me and looked to where my hand rested on the hood. He pressed the ball of his thumb on the top of my index finger and studied the shape of our fingers together as if it was something fascinating. “I missed looking at your face,” he said softly. But he didn’t look at my face when he said it.
Above us, the lights shimmered and changed. They had no beginning or end, but it looked like they were leaving us anyway. I thought again about the mud beneath his fingernails, the abrasion on his temple. What else had happened while I’d been in the woods?
“I missed having my face,” I said. In my head, it had seemed like it would be funny, but when I said it, neither of us laughed. Sam took his hand back and lifted his eyes to the aurora borealis. Sam was still looking off into the sky like he was thinking of nothing, and suddenly I realized, I was being cruel, not saying anything lovey to him after he had said it to me, not saying anything that he needed after being gone for so long. But the moment to say something right back was gone, and I didn’t know how to say something that wouldn’t sound corny. I thought about saying I love you to him, but even thinking about saying it out loud made me feel strange. I didn’t know why it should; I did love him, so much it hurt.
But I didn’t know how to say that. So I held out my hand, and Sam took it.
• SAM •
Outside of the car, the lights were even more dazzling, as if the cold air around us moved and shimmered with violet and pink. I stretched my free hand above me as if I could brush the aurora. It was cold, but a good cold, the sort that made you feel alive. Over our heads, the sky was so clear that we could see every star that could see us. Now that I had kissed Grace, I couldn’t stop thinking about touching her. My mind was full of the places I had yet to touch: the soft skin inside the bend of her elbow, the curve right above her hip bone, the line of her collarbone. I wanted to kiss her again, so badly, I wanted more of her, but instead, we held hands, our heads tipped back, and together we slowly turned, looking up into the infinity. It was like falling, or like flying.
I was torn between wanting to rush out of this moment, toward that more, and wanting to stay in it, living in a state of constant anticipation and constant safety. As soon as we stepped back into the house, the hunt of the wolves would become a real thing again, and I wasn’t ready.
Grace, out of the blue, asked, “Sam, are you going to marry me?”
I jerked, looking over at her, but she was still gazing up into the stars as if she’d merely asked about the weather. Her eyes, however, had a sort of hard, squinty look about them that belied the nonchalant sound of her voice.
I didn’t know what she expected me to say. I felt like laughing out loud. Because I realized all in a rush that of course she was right — yes, the woods would claim her for the cold months, but she wasn’t dying; I hadn’t lost her for good. And I had her right here, now. In comparison, everything else seemed small, manageable, secondary.
Suddenly the world seemed like a promising, friendly place. Suddenly I saw the future, and it was a place I wanted to be.
I realized that Grace was still waiting for an answer. I pulled her closer, until we were nose to nose under the northern lights. “Are you asking?” I said.
“Just clarifying,” Grace replied. But she was smiling, a tiny, genuine smile, because she had already read my thoughts. By her temple, little flyaway blond hairs drifted in the breeze; they looked like they must tickle, but she didn’t twitch. “I mean, instead of living in sin.”
And then I did laugh, even though the future was a dangerous place, because I loved her, and she loved me, and the world was beautiful and awash with pink light around us.
She kissed me, very lightly. “Say okay.” She was starting to shiver.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.”
It felt like a physical thing, held in my hands.
“Do you really mean it?” she asked. “Don’t say it if you don’t really mean it.”
My voice didn’t sound as earnest as I felt. “I really mean it.”
“Okay,” Grace said, and just like that, she seemed content and solid, certain of my affections. She gave a little sigh and rearranged our hands so that our fingers were intertwined. “Now you can take me home.”