the warm day to wash the Volkswagen, scrubbing off the last of the salt and sand painted on from an eternity of winter snow. The front windows were rolled down so that I could hear music playing while I worked. It was a thumping guitar piece with harmonies and a soaring melody that I would forever associate with the hope of that moment, the moment that she called and said, Will you come get me?
The car and my arms were covered with suds, and I didn’t bother to dry off. I just threw my phone on the passenger seat and turned the key in the ignition. As I backed out, I was in such a hurry that I revved the engine up high, high, high as I shifted gears from reverse to first, my foot slipping on the clutch. The ascending engine note matched the beat of my heart.
Overhead, the sky was huge and blue and filled with white clouds painted with thin ice crystals too far above the earth for me to feel, here on the warm ground. I was ten minutes down the road before I realized I had forgotten to roll up the windows; the air had dried the soap on my arms to white streaks. I met another car on the highway and passed it in a no passing zone.
In ten minutes, I would have Grace in my passenger seat. Everything would be all right. I could already feel her fingers laced in mine, her cheek pressed against my neck. It felt like years since I’d had my arms wrapped around her body, my hands pressed up against her rib cage. Ages since I’d kissed her. Lifetimes since I’d heard her laugh.
I ached with the weight of my hope. I fixated on the incredibly inconsequential fact that for two months, Cole and I had been living on dinners of jelly sandwiches and canned tuna and frozen burritos. Once Grace was back, we would do better. I thought we had a jar of spaghetti sauce and some dried pasta. It seemed incredibly important to have a proper dinner for her return.
Every minute closer to her. In the back of my head, nagging concerns pressed, and the biggest ones involved Grace’s parents. They were certain that I’d had something to do with her disappearance, since she’d fought with them about me right before she shifted. In the two months that she’d been gone, the police had been out to search my car and question me. Grace’s mother found excuses to walk by the bookstore when I was working, staring in the window while I pretended not to see. Articles about Grace’s and Olivia’s disappearances ran in the local paper, and they said everything about me but my name.
Deep down, I knew that this — Grace as a wolf, her parents as enemies, me in Mercy Falls in this newly minted body — was a Gordian knot, impossible to untangle and lay straight. But surely if I had Grace, it would work out.
I nearly drove by Ben’s Fish and Tackle, a nondescript building mostly hidden by scrubby pines. The Volkswagen lurched as I pulled into the parking lot; the potholes in the gravel were deep and filled with muddy water that I heard splashing up on the undercarriage. Scanning the lot as I pulled in, I slowed. There were a few U-Hauls parked behind the building. And there, beside them, near the trees —
I pulled the car to the edge of the lot and climbed out, leaving it running. I stepped over a wooden railroad tie and stopped. At my feet, in the wet grass, lay a flowered dress. A few feet away from me, I saw an abandoned clog, and another yard beyond it, lying on its side, its mate. I took a deep breath, then knelt to pick up the dress. Balled in my hand, the fabric was scented softly with the memory of Grace. I straightened and swallowed.
From here, I could see the side of the Volkswagen, covered in filth from the parking lot. It was as if I had never washed it.
I climbed back behind the wheel, laying the dress in the backseat, and then I cupped my hands over my nose and mouth, breathing the same breaths over and over again, my elbows braced against the wheel. I sat there for several long moments, looking out over the dash at the left-behind set of shoes.