Forever

chapter FIFTY-ONE

• SAM •

As soon as I saw the peninsula, I knew it was the solution.

It wasn’t that the entrance was exceedingly propitious. There was a rough-hewn log entranceway with the words KNIFE LAKE LODGE burned into it, and on either side of that was stockade fencing. Koenig swore softly over the combination lock on the gate until it yielded, and then he showed us how the stockade fence gave way to box wire fencing U-nailed to evergreen trees every few feet. He was polite and matter-of-fact, like a realtor showing potential clients an expensive piece of land.

“What happens when it gets to the water?” I asked. Beside me, Grace slapped a mosquito. There were a lot of them, despite the chill. I was glad that we’d come so early in the day, because the air had teeth up here.

Koenig gave the wire a tug; it remained snugly pinned to the ragged bark of the pine. “It goes a couple of yards into the lake, like I said. Did I say that before? Would you like to take a look?”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take a look. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Overhead, a thrush called continuously, sounding like a rusty swing set in motion. Slightly farther away, I could hear another bird singing like someone rolling their r’s, and beyond that one, another bird keening, and beyond that, another still — the kind of dense, endless layers of trees and birds that you got when there was not a human footprint in hundreds and hundreds of acres. Standing in this old conifer forest, long-since abandoned by people, I smelled a herd of deer and creeping beavers and small rodents turning over rocky soil, and as nervous excitement tapped through my veins, I felt more wolf than I had in a long time.

“I do,” Grace said. “If you don’t mind.”

“It’s why we’re here,” Koenig said, and set off through the trees, sure-footed as always. “Don’t forget to check yourself for ticks when we’re all through.”

I trailed after, content to let Grace look at the concrete details of life while I walked through the forest and tried to imagine the pack here. These woods were dense and difficult to walk through; the ground was covered with ferns that hid dips and rocks. The fence was enough to keep out large animals, so unlike Boundary Wood, there were no natural paths worn through the underbrush. The wolves would have no competition here. No danger. Koenig was right; if the wolves were to be moved, you couldn’t ask for a better place.

Grace squeezed my elbow, making so much noise on the way to me that I realized I had been left far behind. “Sam,” she said, and she was breathless, as if she might have been thinking the same thing I was. “Did you see the lodge?”

“I was looking at the ferns,” I said.

She grabbed hold of my arm and laughed, a clear, happy laugh that I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Ferns,” she repeated, and hugged my arm. “Crazy boy. Come over here.”

Holding hands felt strangely fanciful when done in the presence of Koenig, possibly because it was the first thing he looked at when we emerged in the clearing that held the lodge. He had put a baseball cap on his head to ward off deer flies in the open area — which somehow managed to make him look more formal, not less — and stood in front of a faded wooden cabin that seemed enormous to me. It was all windows and rough-hewn timber and looked like something tourists imagined Minnesota looked like.

“That’s the lodge?”

Koenig led the way, kicking debris off the concrete pad in front of the building. “Yeah. It used to be a lot nicer.”

I had been expecting — no, not even expecting, merely hoping for — a tiny cabin, some remnant of the resort’s former life that members of the pack could shelter in when they became human. Somehow, when Koenig had said resort, I hadn’t thought he’d really meant it. I’d thought it was a slightly aggrandized retelling of a failed family business. This must have been something to look at when it was first built.

Grace pulled her hand away from me so she could investigate better. She peered in a dusty window, cupping her hands against the glass. A vine rested on top of her head; the rest of it crawled up the side of the lodge. She stood in ankle-deep weeds that had sprung up in the crack between the concrete pad and the foundation. She looked very tidy in comparison, clean jeans, one of my windbreakers, her blond hair spread over her shoulders. “Seems pretty nice to me,” Grace said, forever endearing her to me.

It seemed to endear her to Koenig, too. Once he realized she wasn’t being sarcastic, he said, “I suppose so. There’s no power here, though, not anymore. I guess you could get it put back on, but you’d have to have meter guys come out here then, once a month.”

Grace, her face still smushed against the glass, said, “Oh, that sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. That’s a big fireplace in there, though, isn’t it? You could make it livable without power, if you were clever.” I stood next to her and pressed my face against the window. Inside, I saw a dim great room dominated by a massive fireplace. Everything looked gray and abandoned: rugs made colorless by dust, a dead potted plant, a mounted animal head rendered unidentifiable by age. It was an abandoned hotel lobby, a snapshot of the Titanic under the ocean. A small cabin seemed more manageable all of a sudden.

“Can I go look at the rest of the land?” I asked, drawing back from the glass. I pulled Grace gently away from the climbing vine; it was poison ivy.

“Be my guest,” Koenig said. Then, after a pause, he said, “Sam?” There was a cautious note to the way he said it that made me think I wasn’t going to like what he said next.

“Yes, sir?” I asked. The sir slipped out before I even thought about it, and Grace didn’t even glance over in my direction at it, just looked at Koenig herself. It was that sort of way that he’d said, Sam?

“Geoffrey Beck is your legal adoptive father, correct?”

“Yes,” I said. My heart jerked in my chest at the question, not because my answer was a lie, but because I didn’t understand why he was asking it. Maybe he was going to change his mind about helping us. I tried to sound nonchalant. “Why do you ask?”

“I am trying to decide if I regard what he did to you as a crime,” Koenig said.

Even though we were far out of context, here in Nowhere, Minnesota, I knew what he meant. This was what he meant: me, pinned in a snowbank in front of an ordinary house, wolf breath hot on my face. Now my heart was really going. Maybe he had never intended to help us. Maybe this entire trip, every single conversation, had been to incriminate Beck. How did I know what this was about? My face felt hot; maybe it had been naive of me to think that a cop would so willingly help us.

I held Koenig’s gaze though my pulse was fast. “He couldn’t know that my parents would try to kill me.”

“Ah, but that makes it more odious, I believe,” Koenig replied, so quickly that he must’ve known how I would counter him. “If they hadn’t tried to kill you and removed themselves from the picture, what were his intentions? Kidnapping? Would he have taken you if they hadn’t made it easy?”

Grace interrupted, “You can’t charge someone for something they might have done.”

I glanced at her. I wondered if she was thinking the same things I was.

Koenig continued, “But he did have those two wolves attack Sam, with an intent to harm.”

“Not harm,” I muttered, but I looked away.

Koenig’s voice was grave. “I consider what he did to you harm. Would you walk up to someone else’s child, Grace, and bite them?”

Grace made a face.

“How about you, Sam? No? Just because most of the world doesn’t know about the weapon that Geoffrey Beck used on you doesn’t make it less of an assault.”

On the one hand, I knew he was right, but on the other was the Beck that I knew, the Beck who had made me who I was. If Grace thought I was a kind person, a generous one, it was because I had learned it from Beck. If he was a monster, surely I should have become a tiny monster in his image? All of these years, I had known the facts of my coming to the pack. The slow car, the wolves, the death of Sam Roth, son of middle-class parents in Duluth, one of whom had worked in the post office, the other of whom had worked in an office doing nothing that looked like work to a seven-year-old. As an adult looking back, the wolf attack was clearly no accident. And as an adult, I knew Beck was behind it. That he’d engineered it — “engineer” was such a purposeful word, hard to mitigate.

“Did he do anything else to you, Sam?” Koenig asked.

For one long minute, I didn’t realize what he meant. Then my head jerked up. “No!”

Koenig just looked at me, reproachful. I hated him then for taking Beck away from me, but I hated Beck more, for being so easily taken. I missed right and wrong and nothing in between.

“Stop,” I said. “Just stop. Please?”

Grace said gently, “Beck’s a wolf now. I think you’d find it very hard to prosecute him, and even if you did, I think he’s serving his sentence right now.”

“I’m sorry.” Koenig held up his hands as if I were pointing a weapon at him. “Cop-brain. You’re right. I just — never mind. It’s very hard to get it out of your mind, once you start thinking about it. Your story. The pack’s story. Do you want to go inside the lodge? I’m going inside for a moment. I want to make sure there is nothing in there that any family members might be tempted to come back for.”

“I’m going to walk first,” I said. I felt hollow with relief, that Koenig was really as he seemed. Everything about this plan felt fragile. “If that’s okay.”

Koenig nodded sharply, still looking apologetic. He tried the handle of the door. It opened without protest and he didn’t look at us as he went inside.

Once he’d disappeared inside, I headed around the back of the lodge, Grace following after she’d plucked a tick from the leg of her jeans and crushed it with her fingernail. I had no fixed thought of where I wanted to go, just away, just farther into the wild, just more; I suppose I had an idea I wanted to see the lake. A wooden plank path led us one hundred feet away from the lodge and back into the trees before giving way to ferns and thorns. I listened to the birds and the sounds of our feet through the underbrush. The afternoon sun was painting everything shades of gold and green. I felt very quiet and small and still inside.

Grace said, “Sam, this could work.”

I didn’t look at her. I was thinking about the miles of road between us and home. Beck’s house already felt like a wistful memory. “That lodge is scary.”

“It could be cleaned up,” Grace said. “It could work.”

“I know,” I said. “I know it could.”

There was a massive outcropping before us, the slender rocks longer than the Volkswagen, flat as shingles. Grace only paused for a moment before climbing up the side. I scrambled up after her and together we stood, higher than we had been before, but still not high enough to see the tops of the tallest trees. There was only the humming feeling one gets up high, that feeling that the ground was moving slightly, to say that we were any closer to the sky than we were on the ground. I had never seen pines this tall in Mercy Falls. One pine slanted close to the top of the outcropping and Grace dragged her fingers along its trunk, her face wondering. “It’s so beautiful.” She had to pause, her hand rested on the bark, to tip her head all the way back to see the top. There was something lovely in the way her mouth looked, lips parted with amazement, something lovely about just the line of her back and legs altogether, at home on top of this massive pile of rock in the middle of nowhere.

I said, “You make it easy to love you.”

Grace dropped her fingers from the tree and turned to me. She turned her head sideways as if I’d told a riddle and she had to work to puzzle it out. “Why do you look so sad?”

I put my hands in my pockets and looked at the ground beyond the rock. There were a dozen different shades of green down there, if you were really looking. As a wolf, there wouldn’t be a single one. “This is the place. But it’s going to have to be me, Grace. That’s what Cole wants. We can’t trap all of the wolves and we don’t have enough people to drive them out. The only chance we have is to lead them out, and it has to be a wolf with some sense of human direction. I wanted Cole to do it. I thought about this: If everything were fair and logical, it would be him. He likes being a wolf; it’s his science, his toys. If the world were a fair place, he would be the one to lead them out. But no. He told me he couldn’t hold anything in his head when he was a wolf. He said he wanted to, but he couldn’t.”

I heard Grace breathing, slow and cautious, but she didn’t say anything.

“You don’t even shift anymore,” Grace said.

I knew the answer to that. With utmost certainty. “Cole could make it happen.”

Grace pulled one of my hands out of a pocket and rested my curled fingers in her palm. I felt her pulse, light and steady, against my thumb.

“I was beginning to take these for granted,” I said, moving my fingers against her skin. “I was beginning to think I’d never have to do it again. I was beginning to like the person I was.” I wanted to tell her how badly I didn’t want to shift again, how badly I didn’t even want to think about shifting. How I was starting to finally think of myself in present tense, life in motion instead of life, preserved. But I didn’t trust my voice to take me there. And admitting it out loud wouldn’t make what had to be done any easier. So again I was silent.

“Oh, Sam,” she said. She put her arms around my neck and let me rest my face against her skin. Her fingers moved through my hair. I heard her swallow. “When we —”

But she didn’t finish. She just squeezed my neck hard enough that my breath had to ease by her body to escape. I kissed her collarbone, her hair tickling my face. She sighed.

Why did everything feel like saying good-bye?

The forest was noisy around us: birds singing, water splashing, wind whispering sh-sh-sh through the leaves; this was the sound of its breathing before we arrived and would keep being such after we left. The cloth of this natural world was made of private, unspoken sorrows, and ours was just another stitch on the hem.

“Sam.” Koenig stood at the base of the outcropping. Grace and I stepped back from each other. I had one of Grace’s hairs in my mouth. I removed it. “Your phone rang and dropped the call before they could leave a message. There’s not enough reception out here for anyone to get through, really. It was your home number.”

Cole.

“We should get back,” Grace said, already climbing down with the same aplomb that she’d made the ascent. She stood beside Koenig and together they surveyed the rock and the surrounding forest until I joined them.

Koenig made the smallest of head gestures to the forest around us. “What do you think?”

I looked at Grace, so Koenig did, too. She just nodded.

“You, too?” Koenig asked me.

I smiled ruefully.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “This is a good place to be lost.”