chapter FORTY-SIX
• SAM •
I didn’t realize how accustomed I’d become to a lack of routine until we had one. Somehow, with Grace back in the house and Cole’s scientific exploration more focused, our lives took on a sheen of normalcy. I became diurnal again. The kitchen once more became a place for eating; on the counter, prescription drug bottles and scribbled notes were slowly exchanged for cereal boxes and coffee mugs with rings in the bottom. Grace shifted only once in three days, and even then just for a few hours, returning shakily to bed after shutting herself in the bathroom for the duration. The days felt shorter, somehow, when night and sleeping came on a schedule. I went to work and sold books to whispering customers and came home with the feeling of a condemned man given a few days’ reprieve. Cole spent his days trying to trap wolves and fell asleep in a different bedroom each night. In the mornings, I caught Grace putting out pans of stale granola for the pair of raccoons, and in the evenings, I caught her wistfully looking at college websites and chatting with Rachel. We were all hunting for something elusive and impossible.
The wolf hunt was on the news most nights.
But I was — not quite happy. Pending happy. I knew this was not really my life; it was a borrowed life. One that I was temporarily wearing until I could sort out my own. The date of the wolf hunt felt far away and implausible, but it was impossible to forget. Just because I couldn’t think of what to do didn’t mean that something didn’t need to be done.
On Wednesday, I called Koenig and asked him if he could give me directions to the peninsula so I could properly investigate its potential. That’s what I said — “properly investigate.” Koenig always seemed to have that effect on me.
“I think,” Koenig said, with an emphasis on think that indicated he really meant know, “that it would be better if I took you out there. Wouldn’t want you getting the wrong peninsula. I can do Saturday.”
I didn’t realize that he had made a joke until we’d hung up, and then I felt bad for not laughing.
On Thursday, the newspaper called. What did I have to say about the Grace Brisbane missing persons case?
Nothing, that was what I had to say. Actually, what I had said to my guitar the night before was
you can’t lose a girl you misplaced years before
stop looking
stop looking
But the song wasn’t ready for public consumption, so I just hung up the phone without saying anything else.
On Friday, Grace told me that she was coming with Koenig and me to the peninsula. “I want Koenig to see me,” she said. She was sitting on my bed matching socks while I tried out different ways of folding towels. “If he knows I’m alive, there can’t be a missing persons case.”
Uncertainty made an indigestible lump in my stomach. The possibilities sown by that action seemed to grow rapid and fierce. “He’ll say you have to go back to your parents.”
“Then we’ll go see them,” Grace said. She threw a sock with a hole in it to the end of the bed. “Peninsula first, then them.”
“Grace?” I said, but I wasn’t sure what I was asking her.
“They’re never home,” she said recklessly. “If they’re home, me talking to them was meant to be. Sam, don’t give me that look. I’m tired of this … not knowing. I can’t relax, waiting for the ax to fall. I’m not going to have people suspecting you of — of — whatever it is they think you did. Kidnapped me. Killed me. Whatever. I can’t fix very much these days, but I can fix that. I can’t take the idea of them thinking of you that way.”
“But your parents …”
Grace made a massive ball of socks without mates between her hands. I wondered if I’d unknowingly been wandering about all this time in socks that didn’t quite match. “They only have a couple of months until I’m eighteen, Sam, and then they can’t say anything about what I do. They can choose the hard way and lose me forever as soon as my birthday rolls around, or they can be reasonable and we can one day be on speaking terms with them again. Maybe. Is it true that Dad punched you? Cole says he punched you.”
She read the response in my face.
“Yeah,” she said, and she sighed, the first evidence that this topic held any pain for her. “And that is why I’m not going to have a problem having this conversation with them.”
“I hate confrontation,” I muttered. It was possibly the most unnecessary thing I had ever said.
“I don’t understand,” Grace said, stretching out her legs, “how a guy who never seems to wear any socks has so many ones that don’t match.”
We both looked at my bare feet. She reached out her hand as if she could possibly reach my toes from where she sat. I grabbed her hand and kissed her palm instead. Her hand smelled like butter and flour and home.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it your way. Koenig, then your parents.”
“It’s better to have a plan,” she said.
I didn’t know if that was true. But it felt true.