chapter NINE
• SAM •
I was a general. I sat awake for most of the night poring over maps and strategies of how to confront Cole. Using Beck’s chair as my fortress, I swiveled back and forth in it, scribbling fragments of potential dialogue on Beck’s old calendar and using games of solitaire for divination. If I won this game, I would tell Cole the rules by which he had to live to stay in this house. If I lost, I would say nothing and wait to see what happened. As the night grew longer, I made more complicated rules for myself: If I won but it took me longer than two minutes, I would write Cole a note and tape it to his bedroom door. If I won and put down the king of hearts first, I would call him from work and read him a list of bylaws.
In between solitaire games, I tried out sentences in my head. Somewhere, there were words that would convey my concern to Cole without sounding patronizing. Words that sounded tactful but persuasive. That somewhere was not a place I could imagine finding.
Every so often, I crept out of Beck’s office and down the dim gray hallway to the living room door, and I stood and watched Cole’s seizure-spent body until I was certain I had seen him take a breath. Then frustration and anger propelled me back to Beck’s office for more futile planning.
My eyes burned with exhaustion, but I couldn’t sleep. If Cole woke up, I might speak to him. If I’d just won a game of solitaire. I couldn’t risk him waking and me not speaking to him right away. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t risk it — I just knew I couldn’t sleep knowing he might wake up in the interim.
When the phone rang, I started hard enough to make Beck’s chair spin. I let the chair complete its rotation, then cautiously picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Sam,” Isabel said. Her voice was brisk and detached. “Do you have a moment to chat?”
Chat. I had a special brand of hatred for the phone as a chatting medium. It didn’t allow for spaces or silences or breaths. It was speaking or nothing, and that felt unnatural for me. I said, cautiously, “Yes.”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier,” Isabel said. Her voice was still the sharp, enunciated words of a telephone bill collector. “My father is meeting with a congressman about getting the wolves taken off the protected list. Think helicopters and sharpshooters.”
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t what I thought she’d wanted to chat about. Beck’s chair still had some momentum, so I let it turn another time. My tired eyes felt like they were being pickled in my skull. I wondered if Cole was awake yet. I wondered if he was still breathing. I remembered a small, stocking-hatted boy being pushed into a snowbank by wolves. I thought about how far away Grace must be by now.
“Sam. Did you hear me?”
“Helicopters,” I said. “Sharpshooters. Yes.”
Her voice was cool. “Grace, shot through the head from three hundred yards.”
It stung, but in the way that distant, hypothetical horrors did, like disasters reported on the news. “Isabel,” I said, “what do you want from me?”
“What I always want,” she replied. “For you to do something.”
And in that moment, I missed Grace, more than I had during any time in the past two months. I missed her so hard that it actually did make me catch my breath, like her absence was something real stuck in the back of my throat. Not because having her here would solve these problems, or because it would make Isabel let me be. But for the sharp, selfish reason that if Grace were here, she would have answered that question differently. She would know that when I asked, I didn’t want an answer. She’d tell me to go sleep, and I would be able to. And then this long, terrible day would end, and when I woke up in the morning, everything would look more plausible. Morning lost its healing powers when it arrived and found you already wide-eyed and wary.
“Sam. God, am I talking to myself?” Over the line, I heard the chime cars made when a door was opened. And then a sharp intake of breath as the door shut.
I realized I was being an ingrate. “I’m sorry, Isabel. It’s just been — it’s been a really long day.”
“Tell me about it.” Her feet crunched across gravel. “Is he all right?”
I walked the phone down the hallway. I had to wait a moment to let my eyes adjust to the pools of lamplight — I was so tired that every light source had halos and ghostly trails — and waited for the requisite rise and fall of Cole’s chest.
“Yes,” I whispered. “He’s sleeping.”
“More than he deserves,” Isabel said.
I realized that it was time to stop pretending to be oblivious. Probably well past time. “Isabel,” I said, “what went on between you two?”
Isabel was silent.
“You aren’t my business.” I hesitated. “But Cole is.”
“Oh, Sam, it’s a little late to be pulling the authority card now.”
I didn’t think that she meant to be cruel, but it smarted. It was only by imagining what Grace had told me of Isabel — of her getting Grace through my disappearance, when Grace had thought I was dead — that kept me on the phone. “Just tell me. Is there something going on between you two?”
“No,” Isabel snapped.
I heard the real meaning, and maybe she meant for me to. It was a no that meant not at the moment. I thought of her face when she saw the needle beside Cole and wondered just how big of a lie that no was. I said, “He’s got a lot to work through. He’s not good for anyone, Isabel.”
She didn’t answer right away. I pressed my fingers against my head, feeling the ghost of the meningitis headache. Looking at the cards on the computer screen, I could see that I had no more options. The timer said it had taken me seven minutes and twenty-one seconds to realize I’d lost.
“Neither,” Isabel said, “were you.”