Forever (25 page)

• GRACE •

Saturday, Officer Koenig came to the house to take us to the peninsula.

We all watched him pull into the driveway, peering out the living room windows. It was thrilling and ironic to be inviting a policeman over after trying for so long to avoid them. Like Mowgli asking Shere Khan in for some tea and crumpets. Koenig arrived at Beck's house at noon, dressed in a crisp maroon polo shirt and jeans that I thought he'd probably ironed. He drove a pristine gray Chevy truck that he may have ironed as well. He knocked on the door — an efficient
Knock. Knock. Knock
that somehow reminded me of Isabel's laugh — and when Sam opened it, Koenig stood there with his hands folded neatly in front of him as if he were waiting for his date.

“Come on in,” Sam said.

Koenig stepped into the house, still with one hand professionally holding the other. It seemed like another lifetime that I'd seen him last, standing just like that in the front of our classroom as a bunch of high schoolers assaulted him with questions about the wolves. Olivia had leaned over to me and whispered that he was cute. Now here he was in the front entry, and Olivia was dead.

Olivia was dead.

I was beginning to understand that blank look Sam got when someone said something about his parents. I didn't feel anything at all when I thought
Olivia is dead.
I felt numb as Sam's scars.

I realized that Koenig had spotted me.

“Hi,” I said.

He took a deep breath, as if he were preparing to dive. I would've given almost anything to know what he was thinking. “Well, okay, then,” he said. “There you are.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Here I am.” Cole stepped out of the kitchen behind me and Koenig's eyebrows drew down over his eyes. Cole smiled back, a hard, certain smile. I watched recognition slowly dawn on Koenig's face.

“Of course,” Koenig said. He crossed his arms and turned to Sam. No matter how he moved his arms or stood, something about Koenig gave the impression that he would be difficult to knock over. “Are there any other missing persons living under your roof? Elvis? Jimmy Hoffa? Amelia Earhart? I'd just like to have full disclosure now, before we go any further.”

“This is it,” Sam said. “To the best of my knowledge. Grace would like to come with, if that's okay.”

Koenig considered.

“Are you coming with us, too?” he asked Cole. “Because if so, I'll have to make room in my cab. Also, it's a long drive. If you have a small bladder, I'd use the facilities now.” And that was that. Having established the ground rules for the day — I was a part-time wolf, Cole was a missing rock star — it was down to business.

“I'm not coming,” Cole replied. “I have man's work.”

Sam shot Cole a warning look. It was a look I thought probably had something to do with the kitchen finally looking like a kitchen again and Sam wanting it to stay that way.

Cole's reply was enigmatic. Well, sort of. Whenever Cole wasn't being completely flamboyant, he always seemed mysterious by comparison. “Bring your phone with you. In case I need to get ahold of you.”

Sam rubbed his fingers over his mouth as if he were checking his shaving job. “Don't burn down the house.”

“Okay, Mother,” Cole replied.

“Oh, let's go,” I said.

 

It was a strange trip. We didn't know Koenig at all, and he knew nothing about us except for what nobody else knew. It was made more difficult because he was being kind in a very amorphous way that we weren't certain we were glad for yet. It was hard to be both grateful and talkative.

So we sat three across on the bench seat: Koenig, Sam, me. The truck smelled vaguely like Dr Pepper. Koenig drove eight miles above the speed limit. The road took us northeast, and it wasn't long before civilization began to fall away. The sky overhead was a friendly, cloudless blue, and all the colors seemed supersaturated. If winter had ever been here, this place didn't remember it.

Koenig didn't say anything, just rubbed his hand over his close-cropped hair. He didn't look quite like the Koenig I remembered, this young guy driving us into the middle of nowhere in a civilian truck, wearing a shirt in department-store maroon. This was not who I'd expected to be putting my trust in at this stage. Beside me, Sam practiced a guitar chord on my thigh.

Appearances weren't everything, I supposed.

The truck was silent. After a bit, Sam brought up the weather. He thought it was pretty smooth sailing from here on out. Koenig said he thought that was probably true, but you never knew what Minnesota had in store for you. She could surprise you, he said. I found myself pleased by him referring to Minnesota as a “she.” It seemed to render Koenig more benevolent, somehow. Koenig asked Sam what he was thinking of doing for college, and Sam mentioned that Karyn had offered him a full-time position at the bookstore, and
he was considering it. No shame in that, commented Koenig. I thought about two-hundred-level classes and majors and minors and success quantified by a piece of paper and kind of wished they would change the subject.

Koenig did. “What about St. Clair?”

“Cole? Beck found him,” Sam said. “It was a charity case.”

Koenig glanced over. “For St. Clair or for Beck?”

“That's something I ask myself a lot these days,” Sam replied. He and Koenig exchanged a look at this, and I was surprised to see that Koenig was regarding Sam as an equal, or, if not an equal, at least as an adult. I spent so much time alone with Sam that other people's reactions to him and us together always seemed to come as a shock. It was hard to imagine how one guy could elicit so many different responses from other people. It was like there were forty different versions of Sam. I'd always assumed that everyone took me at face value, but now I wondered — were there forty different versions of Grace out there, too?

We all jumped when Sam's phone rang from my bag — a bag packed with a change of clothing in case I shifted and a novel in case I needed to look busy — and Sam said, “Would you get that, Grace?”

I paused when I saw that the number on the phone wasn't one that I recognized. I showed the screen to Sam as the phone rang again. He shook his head, puzzled.

“Should I?” I asked, tipping it in my hand as if to open it.

“New York,” Koenig said. He looked back to the road. “It's a New York exchange.”

This information didn't enlighten Sam. He shrugged.

I opened the phone and put it to my ear. “Hello?”

The voice on the other side was light and male. “Oh — right. Hello. Is Cole around?”

Sam blinked at me, and I could tell that he could hear the voice as well.

“I think you have a wrong number,” I said. Immediately, my brain processed what this meant — Cole had used Sam's phone to call somewhere. Home? Would Cole have done that?

The voice was not perturbed. His voice was lazy and slippery, like a melting pat of butter. “No, I don't. But I understand. This is Jeremy. We were in a band together.”

“With this person I don't know,” I replied.

“Yes,” Jeremy said. “I have something I would like you to tell Cole St. Clair, if you would. I'd like you to tell him I have given him the best present in the world, and it took quite a lot of effort on my part, so I'd appreciate if he didn't just tear the wrapping off and then throw it away.”

“I'm listening.”

“In eighteen minutes, the present is going to air on Vilkas's radio spot. Cole's parents will be listening, too, I've made sure of that. Do you have that?”

“Vilkas? What station is that on?” I asked. “Not that I'm saying anything.”

“I know what it is,” Koenig said, not looking up from the road. “Rick Vilkas.”

“That's the one,” Jeremy said, overhearing him. “Someone has excellent taste. You sure that Cole isn't around?”

“He really isn't,” I said.

“Will you tell me something? When I last saw our intrepid hero Cole St. Clair, he was not in the best of places. In fact, I might say he was in the worst of them. All I want to know is, is he happy?”

I thought about what I knew of Cole. I thought about what it meant that he had a friend who cared that much about him. Cole could not have ever been terrible through and through, if someone
cared this much about him from his past life. Or maybe he was just so great before he got terrible that he had a friend that rode that through to the other side. It sort of changed the way I thought about Cole, and sort of didn't. “Getting there.”

There was a pause, and then Jeremy said, “And Victor?”

I didn't say anything at all. Neither did Jeremy. Koenig turned the radio on, the volume down, and began to tune it.

Jeremy said, “They both died a long time ago. I was there to see it. You ever watched a friend die in his own skin? Ahh. Well, you can only raise so many of the dead.
Getting there.
” It took me a second to realize that he was repeating my answer from before. “I'll take that. Tell him to listen to Vilkas, if you would. He changed my life. I won't forget that.”

“I never said I knew where he was,” I said.

“I know it,” Jeremy replied. “I won't forget that, either.”

The phone went quiet in my hand. I met Sam's eyes. The almost-summer sun was bright on his face and turned his eyes shockingly, eerily yellow. For half a second, I wondered if his parents would have tried to kill a brown-eyed boy, a blue-eyed boy. Any son that didn't have wolf's eyes already.

“Call Cole,” Sam said.

I dialed Beck's house. The phone rang and rang, and just as I was about to give up, the phone clicked, and a second later, “Da?”

“Cole,” I said, “turn on the radio.”

• COLE •

When I started everything, and by everything, I mean
life
, suicide was a joke.
If I have to ride in that car with you, I'll slash my wrists with a butter knife.
It was as real as a unicorn. No, less real than that. It was as real as the explosion around an animated coyote. A hundred thousand people threaten to kill themselves every day and make a hundred thousand other people laugh, because like a cartoon, it's funny and meaningless. Gone even before you turn off the TV.

Then it was a disease. Something other people got, if they lived someplace dirty enough to get the infection under their nails. It was
not a pleasant dinner table conversation, Cole,
and like the flu, it only killed the weak. If you'd been exposed, you didn't talk about it. Wouldn't want to put other people off their feed.

It wasn't until high school that it became a possibility. Not an immediate one, not like
It is a possibility I will download this album because the guitar is so sick it makes me want to dance
, but possibility in the way that some people said when they grew up, they might be a fireman or an astronaut or a CPA who works late every single weekend while his wife has an affair with the guy who drives the DHL truck. It became a possibility like
Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead.

Life was a cake that looked good on the bakery shelf but turned to sawdust and salt when I ate it.

I looked good when I sang
the end
.

It took NARKOTIKA to make suicide a goal. A reward for services rendered. By the time they knew how to say NARKOTIKA in Russia, Japan, and Iowa, everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.

I had thought I had come to Minnesota to die.

At two fifteen in the afternoon, Rick Vilkas had just finished his first commercial break. He was a music god who'd had us play live on his show and then asked me to sign a poster for his wife, who he said would only make love to our song “Sinking Ship (Going Down).” I'd written
Rock the boat
under my picture and signed my name. Rick Vilkas's on-air persona was confidant, best friend over beer, passing along a secret in a low voice with an elbow in your side.

His voice now, coming through speakers in Beck's living room, was intimate. “Everyone who listens to this show knows — hell, everyone who listens to the radio knows — Cole St. Clair, front man of NARKOTIKA and damned fine songwriter, has been missing for what — almost a year? ten months? somewhere in there. Oh, I know, I know — my producer, he's rolling his eyes. Say what you like, Buddy, he might have been a number one screwup, but he could write a song.”

There it was, my name on the radio. I was sure it had been on the radio plenty of times in the past year, but this was the first time I'd been there for it. I waited to feel something — a sting of regret, guilt, agony — but there was nothing. NARKOTIKA was an ex-girlfriend whose photo no longer had the power to evoke emotion.

Vilkas continued, “Well, it looks like we have some news, and we're the first to break it. Cole St. Clair's not dead, folks. He's not
being held captive by a pack of fangirls or my wife, either. We've got a statement from his agent right now that says that St. Clair had a medical complication related to drug abuse — fancy that, did you people imagine that the lead singer of NARKOTIKA might have a substance abuse problem? — and that he went with his bandmate for some under-the-radar treatment and rehab out of the country. Says here he's back in the States but is asking to be left alone while he ‘figures out what to do next.' There you have it, folks. Cole St. Clair. He's alive. No, no, don't thank me now. Thank me later. Let's hope for a reunion tour, right? Make my wife happy. Take all the time you need, Cole, if you're listening. Rock'll wait.”

Vilkas played one of our songs. I turned the radio off and rubbed my hand over my mouth. My legs were cramped from crouching in front of the stereo.

Six months ago, there would have been nothing worse in this world. There had been nothing I wanted more than to be thought missing or dead, unless it was to actually
be
missing or dead.

On the couch behind me, Isabel said, “So now you're officially reborn.”

I turned the radio back on so I could catch the end of the song. One of my hands lay open on my knee and it felt like the whole world lay on my palm. The day felt like a prison break.

“Yes,” I said. “Looks that way.”