the first one, and then on the next one, the start of something — mostly outnumbered, easily destroyed — and then more and more until finally this one, something that even the untrained eye could spot. Evidence that we’d probably never be cured of each other, but we might be able to keep it from killing us.
I heard the sound of my mother’s footsteps a second before the light to the lab room went on. Then a heavy sigh.
“Isabel, why?”
Cole leaned away and so we were like two possums behind a Dumpster when she stood back to look at us. I saw her doing a quick vitals check: We had all our clothing on, nothing was rumpled, we weren’t injecting ourselves with anything. She looked at Cole; Cole smiled lazily back at her.
“You — you’re from …” my mother started. She squinted at him. I waited for her to say NARKOTIKA, though I’d never imagined her a fan. But she said, “The boy from the stairs. From the house. The naked one. Isabel, when I said I didn’t want you to do this in the house, I didn’t mean to take it to the clinic. Why are you under this counter? Oh, I don’t want to know. I just don’t.”
I didn’t really have anything to say.
My mother rubbed one of her eyebrows with a hand that was holding a closely printed form. “God, where is your car?” “Across the road,” I said.
“Of course it is.” She shook her head. “I am not telling your father I saw you here, Isabel. Just, please, do not …” She didn’t define what I was supposed to avoid doing. Instead, she threw my half-drunk bottle of juice in the trash can by the door, and turned the light out again. Her shoes receded down the hallway and then there was the popping of the outside door opening and closing. The clunk of the dead bolt.
In the darkness, Cole was invisible, but I could still feel him beside me. Sometimes you didn’t have to see something to know it was there.
I felt a tickle on my skin; it took me a moment to realize that Cole was driving his die-cast Mustang up my arm. He was laughing to himself, hushed and infectious, as if there was still any reason to be quiet. He turned the car around at my shoulder and headed back down toward my hand, the wheels skidding on my skin a bit when he laughed.
I thought it was the truest thing I’d ever heard from Cole St. Clair.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
• SAM •
I didn’t realize how accustomed I’d become to a lack of routine until we had one. Somehow, with Grace back in the house and Cole’s scientific exploration more focused, our lives took on a sheen of normalcy. I became diurnal again. The kitchen once more became a place for eating; on the counter, prescription drug bottles and scribbled notes were slowly exchanged for cereal boxes and coffee mugs with rings in the bottom. Grace shifted only once in three days, and even then just for a few hours, returning shakily to bed after shutting herself in the bathroom for the duration. The days felt shorter, somehow, when night and sleeping came on a schedule. I went to work and sold books to whispering customers and came home with the feeling of a condemned man given a few days’ reprieve. Cole spent his days trying to trap wolves and fell asleep in a different bedroom each night. In the mornings, I caught Grace putting out pans of stale granola for the pair of raccoons, and in the evenings, I caught her wistfully looking at college websites and chatting with Rachel. We were all hunting for something elusive and impossible.
The wolf hunt was on the news most nights.
But I was — not quite happy. Pending happy. I knew this was not really my life; it was a borrowed life. One that I was temporarily wearing until I could sort out my own. The date of the wolf hunt felt far away and implausible, but it was impossible to forget. Just because I couldn’t think of what to do didn’t mean that something didn’t need to be done.
On Wednesday, I called Koenig and asked him if he could give me directions to the peninsula so I could properly investigate its potential. That’s what I said — “properly investigate.” Koenig always seemed to have that effect on me.
“I think,” Koenig said, with an emphasis on think