Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) (13 page)

While Grace was at school, I spent a long time in the parking lot, thinking about meeting wild Rachel and wondering what she’d meant by the wolf comment. I debated hunting for Jack, but I wanted to hear what Grace found out at school before I went on any wild-goose chase.

I didn’t quite know how to occupy my time without Grace and without my pack. I felt like someone who has an hour until his bus arrives — not really enough time to do anything important, but too much time to just sit and wait.

The subtle cold bite behind the breeze told me that I couldn’t put off getting on my bus forever.

I finally drove the Bronco to the post office. I had the key to Beck’s post office box, but mostly, what I wanted to do was conjure memories and pretend that I’d run into him there.

I remembered the day Beck had brought me there to pick up my books for school — even now, I remembered it had been a Tuesday, because back then, Tuesdays were my favorite day. I don’t remember why — it was just something about the way that
u
looked like when it was next to
e
that seemed
very friendly. I always loved going to the post office with Beck; it was a treasure cave with rows and rows of little locked boxes holding secrets and surprises only for those with the proper key.

With peculiar clarity, I remembered that conversation clearly, down to the expression on Beck’s face: “Sam. Come on, bucko.”

“What’s that?”

Beck shoved his back ineffectually against the glass door, suffering under the weight of a huge box. “Your brain.”

“I already have a brain.”

“If you did, you’d have opened the door for me.”

I shot him a dark look and let him shove against the door a moment longer before I ducked under his arms to push it open. “What is it really?”

“Schoolbooks. We’re going to educate you properly, so you don’t grow up to be an idiot.”

I remembered being intrigued by the idea of school-in-a-box, just-add-water-and-Sam.

The rest of the pack was equally intrigued. I was the first in the pack to be bitten before finishing school, so the novelty of educating me was fascinating to the others. For several summers, they all took turns with the massive lesson manual and the lovely, ink-smelling new textbooks. They would stuff my brain full all day long: Ulrik for math; Beck for history; Paul for vocabulary, and later, science. They shouted test questions at me across the dinner table, invented songs for the timelines of dead presidents, and converted one of the dining room walls into a giant whiteboard that was always written
with words of the day and dirty jokes that no one would cop to.

When I was done with the first box of books, Beck packed them up and another box came to take its place. When I wasn’t studying my school-in-a-box, I was surfing the Internet for a different sort of education. I surfed for photos of circus freaks and synonyms for the word
intercourse
and for answers to why staring at the stars in the evening tore my heart with longing.

With the third box of books came a new pack member: Shelby, a tanned, slender girl covered in bruises and stumbling under the weight of a heavy Southern accent. I remembered Beck telling Paul, “I couldn’t just leave her there. God! Paul, you didn’t see where she came from. You didn’t see what they were doing to her.”

I’d felt sorry for Shelby, who’d made herself inaccessible to the others. I’d been the only one who had managed to float a life raft to the island that was Shelby, coaxing words out of her and, sometimes, a smile. She was strange, a breakable animal that would do anything to reassert control over her life. She’d steal things from Beck so that he would have to ask where they’d gone, play with the thermostat to watch Paul get up from the couch to fix it, hide my books so that I would talk with her instead of reading. But we were all broken in that house, weren’t we? After all, I was the kid who couldn’t bear to look into a bathroom.

Beck had picked up another box of books from the post office for Shelby, but they didn’t mean the same thing to her that they did to me. She left them to collect dust and looked up wolf behavior online instead.

Now, here in the post office, I stopped in front of Beck’s P.O. box, 730. I touched the chipped paint of the numbers; the three was nearly gone and had been for as long as I’d been coming here. I put the key into the box, but I didn’t turn it. Was it so wrong to want
this
so bad? An ordinary life of ordinary years with Grace, a couple of decades of turning keys in P.O. boxes and lying in bed and putting up Christmas trees in winter?

And now I was thinking of Shelby, again, and the memories bit, sharp as cold next to memories of Grace. Shelby had always thought my attachment to my human life was ludicrous. I still remembered the worst fight we had about it. Not the first, or the last, but the most cruel. I was lying on my bed, reading a copy of Yeats that Ulrik had bought for me, and Shelby jumped onto the mattress and stepped on the pages of the book, wrinkling them beneath her bare foot.

“Come listen to the howls I found online,” she said.

“I’m reading.”

“Mine’s more important,” Shelby said, towering above me, her toes curling and crinkling the pages further. “Why do you bother reading that stuff?” She gestured to the stack of schoolbooks on the desk beside my bed. “That’s not what you’re going to be when you grow up. You’re not going to be a man. You’re going to be a wolf, so you should be learning wolf things.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Well, it’s true. You’re not going to be Sam. All those books are a waste. You’re going to be alpha male. I read about that.
And I’ll be your mate. The alpha female.” Her face was excited, flushed. Shelby wanted nothing more than to leave her past behind.

I ripped Yeats out from beneath her foot and smoothed the page. “I
will be Sam
. I’m never going to stop being Sam.”

“You won’t be!” Shelby’s voice was getting louder. She jumped off my bed and shoved my stack of books over; thousands of words crashed onto the floor. “This is just pretending! We won’t have names, we’ll just be wolves!”

I shouted, “Shut up! I can still be Sam when I’m a wolf!”

Beck burst into the room, then, looking at the scene in his silent way: my books, my life, my dreams, spread under Shelby’s feet, and me on my bed, clutching my wrinkled Yeats in white-knuckled hands.

“What’s going on here?” Beck said.

Shelby jerked a finger at me. “Tell him! Tell him he’s not going to be Sam anymore, when we’re wolves. He can’t be. He won’t even know his name. And I won’t be Shelby.” She was shaking, furious.

Beck’s voice was so quiet I could barely hear him. “Sam will always be Sam.” He took Shelby’s upper arm and marched her out of the room, her feet skidding on my books. Her face was shocked; Beck had been careful to never lay a hand on her since she’d come. I’d never seen him so angry. “Don’t you ever tell him differently, Shelby. Or I will take you back where you came from. I will
take you back
.”

In the hallway, Shelby began to scream, and she didn’t stop until Beck slammed her bedroom door.

He walked back past my room and paused in the doorway. I was gently stacking my books back on the desk. The words shook in my hands as I did.

I thought Beck would say something, but he just picked up a book by his feet and added it to my pile before he left.

Later, I heard Ulrik and Beck; they didn’t realize there weren’t many places in the house a werewolf couldn’t hear. “You were too hard on Shelby,” Ulrik said. “She has a point. What is it you think he’s going to do with all this wonderful book learning, Beck? It’s not as if he’ll ever be able to do what you do.”

There was a long pause and Ulrik said, “What, you can’t be surprised. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you were thinking. But tell me, how did you think Sam would go to college?”

Another pause. Beck said, “Summer school. And some online credits.”

“Right. Let’s say Sam gets his degree. What’s he going to do with it? Go to law school online, too? And then what kind of lawyer would he be? People put up with your eccentric gone-for-the-winter routine because you were established when you were bitten. Sam will have to try to get jobs that ignore his unscheduled disappearance every year. For all the learning you’re stuffing in his head, he’s going to have to get jobs at gas stations like the rest of us. If he even makes it past twenty.”

“You want to tell him to give up? You tell him. I’ll never tell him that.”

“I’m not telling him to give up. I’m telling
you
to give up.”

“Sam doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to. He wants to learn. He’s smart.”

“Beck. You’re going to make him miserable. You can’t give him all the tools to succeed and then let him discover —
poof
— that he can’t use any of them. Shelby’s right. In the end, we’re wolves. I can read him German poetry and Paul can teach him about past participles and you can play Mozart for him, but in the end, it’s a long, cold night and those woods for all of us.”

Another pause before Beck answered, sounding tired and unlike himself.

“Just leave me alone, Ulrik, okay? Just leave me alone.”

The next day Beck told me I didn’t have to do my school-work if I didn’t want to, and he went driving by himself. I waited until he was gone, and then I did the work, anyway.

Now, I wished more than anything that Beck was here with me. I turned the key in the lock, knowing what I’d find — a box stuffed with months’ worth of envelopes and probably a slip to collect more from behind the desk.

But when I opened the box, there were two lonely letters and some junk fliers.

Someone had been here. Recently.

“Do you mind if I go by Olivia’s?” Grace asked, climbing into the car, bringing in a rush of cold air with her. In the passenger seat, I recoiled, and she hurriedly shut the door behind her. She said, “Sorry about that. It got really cold, didn’t it? Anyway, I don’t want to, you know, actually go inside. Just drive by. Rachel said that a wolf had been scratching around Olivia’s house. So maybe we could pick up a trail near there?”

“Go for it,” I said. Taking her hand from where it rested, I kissed her fingertips before replacing it on the wheel. I slouched down in my seat and got my translation of Rilke I’d brought to read while I waited for her.

Grace’s lips lifted slightly at my touch, but she didn’t say anything as she pulled out of the lot. I watched her face, etched into concentration, mouth set in a firm line, and waited to see if she was ready to say what was on her mind. When she didn’t, I picked up the volume of Rilke and slouched down in my seat.

“What are you reading?” Grace asked, after a long space of silence.

I was fairly certain that pragmatic Grace would not have heard of Rilke. “Poetry.”

Grace sighed and gazed out at the dead white sky that seemed to press down on the road before us. “I don’t get poetry.” She seemed to realize her statement might offend, because she hurriedly added, “Maybe I’m reading the wrong stuff.”

“You’re probably just reading it wrong,” I said. I’d seen Grace’s to-be-read pile: nonfiction, books about things, not about how things were described. “You have to listen to the pattern of the words, not just what they’re saying. Like a song.” When she frowned, I paged through my book and scooted closer to her on the bench seat, so that our hip bones were pressed together.

Grace glanced down at the page. “That’s not even in English!”

“Some of them are,” I said. I sighed, remembering. “Ulrik was using Rilke to teach me German. And now I’m going to use it to teach you poetry.”

“Clearly a foreign language,” Grace said.

“Clearly,” I agreed. “Listen to this.
‘Was soll ich mit meinem Munde? Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe.’
”

Grace’s face was puzzled. She chewed her lip in a cute, frustrated sort of way. “So what’s it mean?”

“That’s not the point. The point is what it sounds like. Not just what it means.” I struggled to find words for what I meant. What I wanted to do was remind her of how she’d fallen in love with me as a wolf. Without words. Seeing beyond the obvious meaning of my wolf skin to what was inside. To whatever it was that made me Sam, always.

“Read it again,” Grace said.

I read it again.

She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel. “It sounds sad,” she said. “You’re smiling — I must be right.”

I flipped to the English translation. “‘What then would I do with my lips? With my night? With my day? I have no’ — bah. I don’t like this translation. I’m going to get my other one from the house tomorrow. But yeah, it’s sad.”

“Do I get a prize?”

“Maybe,” I said, and slid my hand underneath one of hers, twining our fingers. Without looking away from the road, she lifted our tangled fingers to her mouth. She kissed my index finger and then put it between her teeth, biting down softly.

She glanced over at me, her eyes holding an unspoken challenge.

I was completely caught. I wanted to tell her to pull over right then because I
needed
to kiss her.

But then I saw a wolf.

“Grace. Stop — stop the car!”

She jerked her head around, trying to see what I saw, but the wolf had already jumped the ditch on the side of the road and headed into the sparse woods.

“Grace,
stop
,” I said. “Jack.”

She hit the brakes; the Bronco shimmied back and forth as she guided it to the shoulder. I didn’t wait for the car to stop. Just shoved open the door and stumbled out, my ankles crying out as I slammed onto the frozen ground. I scanned the woods in front of me. Clouds of sharp-smelling smoke drifted through the trees, mingling with the heavy white clouds that pushed
down from above; someone was burning leaves on the other side of the woods. Through the smoke, I saw the blue-gray wolf hesitating in the woods ahead of me, not sure he was being pursued. Cold air clawed at my skin, and the wolf looked over his shoulder at me. Hazel eyes. Jack. It had to be.

And then he was gone, just like that, plunging into the smoke. I jumped after him, taking the ditch by the side of the road in one leap and running over the cold, hard stubble of the dying winter woods.

As I leaped into the forest, I heard Jack crashing ahead of me, more interested in escape than stealth. I could smell the stink of fear as he bolted ahead of me. The wood smoke was heavier here, and it was hard to tell where the smoke ended and the sky began, snared in the bare branches overhead. Jack was half-invisible in front of me, faster and nimbler than me on his four legs, and impervious to the cold.

My fingers, half-numb, stabbed with pain, and cold pinched the skin of my neck and twisted my gut. I was losing sight of the wolf ahead of me; the one inside me seemed closer all of a sudden.

“Sam!” Grace shouted. She grabbed the back of my shirt, pulling me to a stop, and threw her coat around me. I was coughing, gasping for air and trying to swallow the wolf rising up in me. Wrapping her arms around me as I shuddered, she said, “What were you thinking? What were you —”

She didn’t finish. She pulled me back through the woods, both of us stumbling, my knees buckling. I slowed, especially when we got to the ditch, but Grace didn’t falter, hooking my elbow to haul me up to the Bronco.

Inside, I buried my cold face into the hot skin of her neck and let her wrap her arms around me as I shook uncontrollably. I was acutely aware of the tips of my fingers, of each little pin-prick of pain throbbing individually.

“What were you doing?” Grace demanded, squeezing me hard enough to force the breath out of me. “Sam, you can’t do that! It’s freezing out there! What did you think you were going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said into her neck, balling my hands into fists between us to get them warm. I didn’t know. I just knew that Jack was an unknown, and that I didn’t know what kind of person he was, what sort of a wolf he was. “I don’t know,” I said again.

“Sam, it’s not worth it,” Grace said, and she pressed her face, hard, against my head. “What if you’d changed?” Her fingers were tight on the sleeves of my shirt, and now her voice was breathy. “What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t,” I said, truthfully. I sat back, finally warm enough to stop shivering. I pressed my hands against the heating vents. “I’m sorry.”

For a long moment, there wasn’t any sound but the uneven rumbling of the idling engine. Then Grace said, “Isabel talked to me today. She’s Jack’s sister.” She paused. “She said she’d talked to him.”

I didn’t say anything, just curled my fingers tighter over the vents as if I could physically grab the heat.

“But you can’t just go running after him. It’s getting too cold, and it’s not worth the risk. Promise me you won’t do anything like that again?”

I dropped my eyes. I couldn’t look at her when she sounded like she did now. I said, “What about Isabel? Tell me what she said.”

Grace sighed. “I don’t know. She knows Jack’s alive. She thinks the wolves have something to do with it. She thinks I know something. What should we do?”

I pressed my forehead against my hands. “I don’t know. I wish Beck were here.”

I thought about the two lonely envelopes in the post office box and the wolf in the woods and my still-tingling fingertips. Maybe Beck
was
here.

Hope hurt more than the cold.

Maybe it wasn’t Jack I should’ve been looking for.