chapter THIRTY-THREE
• SAM •
That night, Grace was the wakeful one. I felt like an empty cup, bobbing and tipping to admit rivulets of slumber; it was only a matter of time before it filled up enough to pull me under entirely.
My room was dark except for the Christmas lights strung around the ceiling, tiny constellations in a claustrophobic sky. I kept meaning to pull out the cord beside the bed and put us in darkness, but fatigue whispered in my ear and distracted me. I couldn’t understand how I could be so tired after I’d finally slept the night before. It was like my body had reacquired its taste for sleep now that I had Grace back, and it couldn’t get enough.
Grace sat next to me, her back leaned up against the wall, legs tangled in bedsheets, and ran the flat of her hand up and down my chest, which wasn’t helping me feel any more awake.
“Hey,” I murmured, reaching up toward her with my hand, my fingertips just barely able to brush her shoulder. “Come down here with me and sleep.”
She stretched out her fingers and rested them on my mouth; her face was wistful and not like her, a mask of Grace worn by another girl in this half-light. “I can’t stop thinking.” It was a familiar enough sentiment that I pushed up onto my elbows; her fingers slipped off my lips, back to my chest.
“You should be lying down,” I said. “That will help.”
Grace’s expression was doleful and unsure; she was a little girl. I sat up the rest of the way and pulled her toward me. Together we lay back against my headboard, her head lying on my chest where her hand had been before. She smelled like my shampoo.
“I can’t stop thinking about her,” Grace whispered, braver now that we weren’t looking at each other. “And then I start thinking about how I’m supposed to be at home right now, and, Sam, I don’t want to go back.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I didn’t want her to go back, either, but I knew she wasn’t supposed to be here. If she were human, cured, I would’ve told her that we had to go back and talk to her parents. We would’ve made it work; we would’ve made them understand that we were serious, and then I would have lived without her in my bed until she moved in on the proper terms. I would’ve hated it, but I’d have lived with it. I’d told her I wanted to do it right with her, and I still did.
But now there was no right. Now Grace was a girl who was also a wolf, and as long as she said that she didn’t want to go back, and as long as I remained unsure of how her parents would react, this was where I wanted her. One day soon there would be hell to pay for these stolen moments together, but I didn’t think we were wrong to have them. I ran my fingers through her hair until I hit a tiny knot and had to pull them out to start again. “I won’t make you.”
“We have to figure it out eventually,” Grace said. “I wish I was eighteen. I wish I’d moved out a long time ago. I wish we were already married. I wish I didn’t have to think of a lie.”
At least I wasn’t the only one who thought that they wouldn’t do well with the truth. “Nothing,” I said, with utmost certainty, “will get solved tonight.” After I said it, I recognized, with some irony, Grace’s own reasoning, the statement that she had used many times before to try to lure me to sleep.
“It all just keeps going round and round and round,” Grace said. “Tell me a story.”
I stopped touching her hair because the repetitive comfort of it was making me fall asleep again. “A story?”
She said, “Like you told me about Beck teaching you to hunt.”
I tried to think of an anecdote, something that didn’t need too much explaining. Something that would make her laugh. Every Beck story seemed tainted now, colored by doubt. Everything about him that I hadn’t seen with my own eyes now felt apocryphal.
I cast about for another memory, and said, “That BMW wagon wasn’t the first car Ulrik had. When I first came here, he had a little Ford Escort. It was brown. And very ugly.”
Grace sighed, as if this were a comforting start to a bedtime story. She fisted a handful of my T-shirt; the action woke me up instantly and guiltily made me think of at least four things that were not bedtime stories or selfless ways to comfort a grieving girl.
I swallowed and focused on my memory instead. “There was a lot wrong with it. When you went over bumps, it would scrape on the ground. The exhaust, I think. Once, Ulrik hit a possum in town and he dragged it all the way back home.”
Grace laughed a small, soundless laugh, the sort you laugh when you know you’re expected to.
I pressed on. “It always smelled like something going wrong, too. Like brakes sticking or rubber burning or maybe just like he hadn’t got all the possum off.” I paused, remembering all the trips I’d made in that car, sitting in the passenger seat, waiting in the car while Ulrik ran into the grocery store for some beer or standing beside the road as Beck swore at the silent engine and asked me why he hadn’t just taken his own damn car. That was back in the days when Ulrik had been human a lot, when his bedroom had been right next to mine, and I used to get woken up by the sound of noisy lovemaking, though I was pretty sure Ulrik was alone. I didn’t tell Grace that part.
“It was the car that I used to drive to the bookstore,” I said. “Ulrik bought that BMW wagon from a guy who was selling roses by the side of the road in St. Paul, so I got the Escort. Two months after I’d gotten my license, I got a flat tire in it.” I’d been sixteen in the most naive sense of the word: simultaneously euphoric and terrified to be driving home from work by myself for the first time, and when the tire made an incredible noise that sounded like a gun going off by my head, I thought I might die.
“Did you know how to change tires?” Grace asked. She asked the question like she did.
“Not a chance. I had to pull it over in the slush by the side of the road and use the cell phone I’d just been given for my birthday to call Beck for help. First time I was using the phone, and it was to say I couldn’t change a flat tire. Totally unmanning.”
Grace laughed again, softly. “Unmanning,” she repeated.
“Unmanning,” I assured her, glad to hear that little laugh. I thought back to the memory. Beck had been a long time getting there, dropped off by Ulrik on his way to work. Ignoring my bleak expression, Ulrik waved cheerily at me from the window of the BMW: “Later, boy-o!” His wagon vanished into the oncoming gloom, the taillights neon red in the snow gray world.
“So Beck arrived,” I said, aware then that I had included an anecdote with Beck after all, though I hadn’t meant to. Maybe all of my anecdotes had Beck in them. “He said, ‘So you’ve killed the car, then?’
“He had been all bundled in coats and gloves and scarves, but despite them, he’d already been shivering. He’d whistled when he saw the comically deflated tire. ‘That’s a beauty. You run over a moose?’”
“Had you?” Grace asked.
“No,” I said. “Beck made fun of me and showed me where the spare tire was and —”
I dropped off. I’d meant to tell the story of when Ulrik had finally sold the Escort, how he’d cooked four pounds of bacon and put it in the trunk when people came to look at it because he’d read that real estate agents baked cookies to sell houses to women. Instead I’d somehow gotten sidetracked in my drowsiness and the story I’d started now ended with Beck’s smile vanishing in the time it took for headlights to come over the hill and disappear on the other side — with a pile of scarves and sweaters and gloves on the ground behind the Escort and me with a useless tire iron in my hand and the memory of Beck saying half my name as he shifted.
“And what?”
I tried to think if there was a way that I could spin the story, to make it more cheerful, but as I did, I remembered an aspect of it that I hadn’t thought about for years. “Beck shifted. I was still there with the damn tire iron and still was just as dumb as before.”
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.