Her T-shirt had pulled up just a little, revealing a few inches of her pale belly. Her blond hair was spread out on one side of her head as if she were flying through the air or floating in the water. I stood by the light switch, looking at her and just…wanting.
“Don’t turn it off yet,” Grace said, her voice a little strange. “Just come sit with me for a little bit. I don’t want to sleep yet.”
I turned off the light, anyway—in the sudden darkness, Grace made an annoyed noise—and then I leaned down to hit a switch, turning on a string of Christmas lights stapled around the ceiling. They sparkled through the strange shapes made by the slowly spinning birds, and cast moving shadows, like firelight, across Grace’s face. Her noise of annoyance changed to one of wonder.
“It’s like…” she started, but didn’t finish.
I joined her on the bed, sitting cross-legged next to her instead of lying down. “Like what?” I asked, running the back of my fingers across her stomach.
“Mmmm,” said Grace, half closing her eyes.
“Like what?” I asked again.
“Like looking at the stars,” she said. “With a giant flock of birds flying past.”
I sighed.
“Sam, I really want to buy a red coffeepot, if they exist,” Grace said.
“I’ll find you one,” I said, and laid my hand flat on her belly; her skin was shockingly hot against my hand.
Isabel had told me to ask Grace how she felt. To not wait for her to tell me, because she wouldn’t until it was too late. Because she didn’t want to hurt me.
“Grace?” I said, removing my hand, scared.
Her eyes drifted from the birds spiraling slowly above us to my face. She caught my hand and moved it so that our hands cupped around each other, her fingertips on my lifeline and mine on hers. “What?”
When she spoke, her breath smelled both copper and medicinal; blood and acetaminophen.
I knew I should ask her what was happening, but I wanted just one more minute of peace. One more moment before we faced the truth. So I asked a question that I knew, now, had no correct answer. A question that belonged to a different couple, with a different future. “When we’re married, can we go to the ocean? I’ve never been.”
“When we’re married,” she said, and it didn’t sound like a lie, though her voice was soft and sad, “we can go to all the oceans. Just to say that we did.”
I lay down beside her, our hands still in a knot on her stomach, shoulder to shoulder, and together we looked up through the flock of happy memories flying above us, caught in this room. The Christmas lights winked above us; when the swaying wings eclipsed the bulbs, it made me feel like we were moving, rocking on a giant boat, looking up at unfamiliar constellations.
It was time.
I closed my eyes. “What is happening with you?”
Grace was quiet for so long that I started to doubt that I’d said my question out loud. Then she said, “I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m afraid to go to sleep.”
My heart didn’t so much skip a beat as slow to a crawl. “What does it feel like?”
“It hurts to talk,” she whispered. “And my stomach —it really…” She laid my hand flat on her stomach and then put her hand on top of mine. “Sam, I’m afraid.”
It almost hurt too much to speak after her confession. I said, softly, because it was all I could manage, “It’s from the wolves. Do you think you caught it from that wolf, somehow?”
“I think it is a wolf,” Grace said. “I think it’s the wolf that I never was. That’s what it feels like. It feels like I want to shift, but I never do.”
My mind riffled rapidly through everything I’d ever heard about the wolves and our brilliantly destructive disease, but there was no precedent for this. Grace was the only one of her kind.
“Tell me,” she said, “do you still feel it? The wolf inside you? Or is it gone now?”
I sighed and leaned to rest my forehead against her cheek. Of course it was still there. Of course it was.
“Grace, I’m going to take you to the hospital. We’ll make them find out what’s wrong with you. I don’t care what we have to tell them to make them believe.”
Grace said, “I don’t want to die in a hospital.”
“You’re not going to die,” I told her, lifting my head to look at her. “I’m not done writing songs about you yet.”
Her mouth smiled on one side, and then she tugged me down so she could rest her head on my chest as she closed her eyes.
I didn’t close mine. I watched her and I watched the birds’ shadows flit across her face, and I…wanted.
I wanted more happy memories to hang up on the ceiling, so many happy memories with this girl that they would crowd the ceiling and flap out into the hall and burst out of the house.
An hour later, Grace started throwing up blood.
I couldn’t call 911 and help her at the same time, so I left her curled up against the hallway wall, a thin trail of her own blood showing our path from the bedroom, while I stood in the doorway with the phone, never taking my eyes off her.
Cole—I didn’t remember calling for him —appeared at the top of the stairs and silently brought towels.
“Sam,” Grace said, voice miserable and thin, “my hair.”
It was the smallest thing in the world, blood on the ends of her hair. It was the biggest thing in the world, her being out of control. While Cole helped Grace press a towel to her nose and mouth, I clumsily pulled her hair back into a ponytail, out of the way. Then, when we heard the ambulance pull into the drive, we helped her to her feet and tried to get her downstairs without her throwing up again. The birds fluttered and flapped around us as we hurried out, like they wanted to come with us, but their strings were too short.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
• GRACE • Once upon a time, there was a girl named Grace Brisbane. There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books. She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.
And this one loved her back. He loved her back so hard that even the things that weren’t special about her became special: the way she tapped her pencil on her teeth, the off-key songs she sang in the shower, how when she kissed him he knew it meant forever.
Hers was a memory made up of snapshots: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying good-bye behind a cracked windshield.
A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam’s smile.
It was a life I didn’t want to leave behind.
It was a life I didn’t want to forget.
I wasn’t done with it yet. There was so much more to say.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
• SAM • Flickering lights anonymous doors my heart escaping in drips i ‘m still waking up but she’s still sleeping this ICU is hotel for the dead CHAPTER FORTY-NINE