Forever. Part 13

Sighing, I pulled in behind the truck. I did a better job than him of getting my vehicle off the road, but that wasn't saying much. My mother deftly leaped from the SUV, and I followed her more slowly. There were three stickers on the back of the truck: GO ARMY, HANG UP AND DRIVE, and, inexplicably, I'D RATHER BE IN MINNESOTA.

On the other side of the truck, a cop was talking to a red-haired man who was wearing a white T-shirt and suspenders because he had a belly and no a.s.s. More interestingly, I could see a handgun sitting on the driver's seat through the open door of the truck.

"Dr. Culpeper," said the officer warmly.

My mother adopted her caramel voice - the one that oozed richly about you so slowly you didn't realize you were possibly being suffocated. "Officer Heifort. I just stopped to see if you needed me."

"Well, that's decent of you, for sure," Heifort said. He had his fingers linked in his gun belt. "This your daughter? She's pretty as you, Doc." My mother demurred. Heifort insisted. The red-haired man shifted his weight from foot to foot. They spoke briefly about the mosquitoes this time of year. The red-haired man said that they weren't near as bad as they were going to be. He called them "skeeters."

"What's the gun for?" I asked.

They all looked at me.

I shrugged. "Just wondering."

Heifort said, "Well. Seems Mr. Lundgren here decided to take the wolf hunt into his own hands and do a bit of spotlighting."

The red-haired Mr. Lundgren protested, "Well, now, Officer, you know that's not what went down. I just happened upon it and shot from my truck. That's not quite the same."

"I suppose not," Heifort said. "But there is a dead animal here and no one's supposed to be shooting much of anything after sundown. Much less with a.38 revolver. I know you know better, Mr. Lundgren."

"Wait," I said. "You killed a wolf?" I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jacket. Even though it wasn't that cold, I shivered.

Heifort gestured over toward the front of the truck, shaking his head.

"My husband told me no one was allowed to hunt them until the aerial hunt," my mother said, her caramel voice a bit harder. "To keep from scaring them into hiding."

"That's the truth," Heifort said.

I moved away from them to the ditch where Heifort had gestured, aware that the red-haired man was watching me dolefully. Now I could see a ridge of fur from an animal lying on its side in the gra.s.s.

Dear G.o.d and possibly Saint Anthony, I know I ask for a lot of stupid things, but this one is important: Please don't let that be Grace.

Even though I knew that she was supposed to be safe with Sam and Cole, I sucked in a breath and stepped closer. The ticked fur ruffled in the breeze. There was a small b.l.o.o.d.y hole in its thigh, another in its shoulder, and finally, one just behind the skull. The top of its head was a little gross where the bullet had come out the other side. If I wanted to see if the eyes were familiar, I would have to kneel, but I didn't bother checking.

"This is a coyote," I said accusingly.

"Yes, ma'am," Heifort replied, genial. "Big one, right?"

I let out my breath. Even a city girl like myself could tell the difference between a wolf and a coyote. I was back to a.s.suming Mr. Lundgren had had one too many or just really wanted to try out his new handgun.

"You haven't had too much trouble like this, have you?" Mom was asking Heifort. She was asking it in that way she did when she wanted to know something for my father rather than for herself. "People taking matters into their own hands? You're keeping it under wraps?"

"We're doing the best we can," Heifort said. "Most people are being real good about it. They don't want to spoil things for those helos. But I wouldn't be surprised if we had a mishap or two before the real deal. Boys will be boys." This was with a gesture toward Mr. Lundgren, as if he were deaf. "Like I said, doing the best we can."

My mother looked less than satisfied. Her tone was a bit chilly when she said, "That's what I tell my patients, too." She frowned at me. "Isabel, don't touch that."

As if I was anywhere near it. I climbed back up through the gra.s.s to join her.

"You haven't been drinking tonight, have you, Doc?" Heifort asked, as Mom turned to go. He and Mom both wore matching looks. Candy-coated hostility.

My mother flashed him a large smile. "Oh, yes." She paused to let him consider this. "But Isabel's driving. Come on, Isabel."

When we got back into the car, no sooner had the door slammed than my mother said, "Hicks. I hate that man. This may have cured me of my philanthropic nature for good."

I didn't believe it for a second. Next time she thought she might be able to help, she'd be jumping out of the car again before it stopped rolling. Whether or not they wanted her.

I guess I was turning out a lot like my mother.

"Dad and I have been talking about moving back to California," Mom said. "When this is all over."

I narrowly avoided wrecking the car. "And you were going to tell me ... when?"

"When it became more definite. I have a few leads on jobs out there; it's just a question of their hours and how much we can sell the house for."

"Again," I said, a little breathless, "you were going to tell me when?"

My mother sounded perplexed. "Well, Isabel, you're about to go off to college, and all but two on your list are there. It will make it easier for you to visit. I thought you hated it here."

"I did. I do. I just - I can't believe you didn't tell me it was an option, before -" I wasn't sure how to end the sentence, so I just stopped.

"Before what?"

I threw one of my hands up in the air. I would have thrown both, but I had to keep one on the wheel. "Nothing. California. Great. Yahoo." I thought about it - stuffing my giant coats in boxes, having a social life, living someplace where not everyone knew the sordid history of my dead brother. Trading Grace and Sam and Cole for a life of cell phone plans, seventy-three-degree days, and textbooks. Yes, college in California had always been the plan, in the future. Apparently, however, the future was getting here faster than I'd expected.

"I can't believe that man mistook a coyote for a wolf," my mother mused as I pulled into our driveway. I remembered when we'd first moved here. I'd thought the house looked like something out of a horror movie. Now, I saw that I'd left my light on in my third-floor bedroom and it looked like something out of a children's book, a big sprawling Tudor with one yellow window on the top floor. "They look nothing alike."

"Well," I said, "some people see what they want to see."

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 st.u.r.dier 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 pa.s.sed, 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 b.u.mps 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.