Isabel propelled me toward a door; I stumbled into another room. She said, “Get in there. Be quiet! I’ll take care of it.”
“Isabel,” I gasped, “I can’t —”
The massive old lock at the other side of the hall cracked out like a shot, at the same moment that Isabel slammed the door shut in my face.
• ISABEL •
For a single moment, I couldn’t figure out if my father had seen Grace. His normally tidy hair was all disheveled and his eyes were full of shock or surprise or something else unguarded. He’d opened the door with such force that it banged into the wall behind it and bounced back again. The moose rattled; I waited for it to fall over. I’d never considered what an awesome sight it would be, to see all these animals start to tip like dominoes. My father was still shaking even after the moose had stopped.
I glowered at my father to cover my uneasiness. “Well, that was dramatic.” I was leaning against the door to the piano room. I hoped that Grace wouldn’t break anything in there.
“Thank God,” my father said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Why the hell didn’t you pick up your phone?”
I looked at him incredulously. I quite frequently let my parents’ calls go through to voicemail. I called them back. Eventually. The fact that I’d let their calls beep through earlier today shouldn’t have given them an ulcer.
Mom trailed into the room, her eyes bloodshot and her makeup a minor disaster. Considering that she normally made tears look like an accessory, I was impressed. I had thought this might be about the cop who’d stopped me, but I couldn’t imagine Mom losing it over that.
I asked, suspiciously, “Why is Mom crying like that?”
My mother’s voice was nearly a snarl. “Isabel, we gave you that cell phone for a reason!”
I was doubly impressed. Good for her. She normally let my father get all the good lines.
“Do you have it on your person?” my father asked.
“Jesus,” I replied. “My person has it in her purse.”
My father gave my mother a glance. “I expect you to pick it up from now on,” he said. “Unless you are in class or missing a limb, I want that phone to be picked up and held to your ear when you see that it is us. Or you can say good-bye to it. A phone is a —”
“Privilege. Yeah, I know.” I heard faint noises from inside the piano room behind me; to cover up the sound I began digging through my bag. When it had stopped, I pulled out my phone to prove that I had it. It showed twelve missed calls from my parents. And none from Cole, which, after over a month of having at least one missed call from him at all times, felt weird. I frowned. “So what’s going on, anyway?”
My father said, “Travis called me and told me the police had just found a body in the woods. A girl, and they haven’t identified her yet.”
This was not good. I was glad that I knew that Grace was here, in the piano room making weird scratching noises. I realized Mom was still staring at me meaningfully; I was supposed to react.
I said, “And you just assumed that some random dead person was me?”
“It was near our property line, Isabel,” Mom snapped.
Then my father said what I’d somehow known he was going to say. “She was killed by wolves.”
I was filled with incredible anger, all of a sudden, at Sam and Cole and Grace, for doing nothing when I’d told them to do something.
There was more noise coming from the piano room. I spoke over the top of it. “Well, I’ve been at school or here all day. Hard to get killed at school.” Then, because I realized I needed to ask or look guilty: “When will they know who she is?”
“I don’t know,” my father said. “They said she was in bad shape.”
Mom said abruptly, “I’m going to go change out of these clothes.” For a moment, I couldn’t puzzle out the reason for her speedy exit. Then I realized she must’ve been thinking about my brother’s death, imagining Jack torn apart by wolves. I was impervious; I knew how Jack had really died.
Just then, there was a thump from the piano room, clear enough that my father’s eyes narrowed.
“I’m sorry I didn’t pick up the phone,” I said loudly. “I didn’t mean to upset Mom. Hey. Something hit the bottom of my car on the way home. Would you look at it?”
I waited for him to refuse me, to charge into the other room and find Grace shifting into a wolf. But instead he sighed and nodded, already heading back toward the other door.
Of course there was nothing under my car for him to find. But he spent so long investigating that I had time to hurry back to the piano room to see if Grace had destroyed the Steinway. All I found was an open window and one of the screens pushed out into the yard. I leaned out and caught a glimpse of yellow — my Santa Maria Academy shirt, snagged on one of the bushes.
There had never been a worse time for Grace to be a wolf.
• SAM •
So I had missed her again.
After the phone call, I lost hours to — nothing. Caught completely by the sound of Grace’s voice, my thoughts chased each other, the same questions over and over. Wondering if I would have been able to see Grace if I’d gotten her message earlier, if I hadn’t gone out to check the shed for signs of life, if I hadn’t walked farther into the woods and shouted up through birch leaves to the sky, frustrated by Cole’s seizure and Grace’s absence and by just the weight of being me.
I drowned in the questions until the light failed. Hours gone, like I’d shifted, but I’d never left my own skin. It had been years since I’d lost time like this.
Once upon a time, that was my life. I used to look out the window for hours at a time, until my legs fell asleep beneath me. It was when I first came to Beck — I must’ve been eight or so, not long after my parents had left me with my scars. Ulrik sometimes picked me up under my armpits and pulled me back toward the kitchen and a life occupied by other people, but I was a silent, quivering participant. Hours, days, months gone, lost to another place that admitted neither Sam nor wolf. It was Beck who finally broke the spell.
He had offered me a tissue; it was a strange enough gift that it brought me to the present. Beck waved it at me again. “Sam. Your face.”
I touched my cheeks; they weren’t so much damp as sticky with the memory of continuous tears. “I wasn’t crying,” I told him.
“I know you weren’t,” Beck replied.
While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell you something? There are a lot of empty boxes in your head, Sam.”
I looked at him, quizzical. Again, it was a strange enough concept to hold my attention.
“There are a lot of empty boxes in there, and you can put things in them.” Beck handed me another tissue for the other side of my face.
My trust of Beck at that point was not yet complete; I remember thinking that he was making a very bad joke that I wasn’t getting. My voice sounded wary, even to me. “What kinds of things?”
“Sad things,” Beck said. “Do you have a lot of sad things in your head?”
“No,” I said.
Beck sucked in his lower lip and released it slowly. “Well, I do.”