Forever

Page 23

 

  “Garage?” I suggested. He nodded again.

  Another muffled scrape seemed to confirm my assessment. Sam and I tumbled out of bed in slow motion; both of us were still clothed in what we’d worn to chase the aurora borealis. Sam led the way down the stairs and then the hall, so it was me who first saw Cole emerging from the hallway to the downstairs bedrooms. His hair was crazily spiked. I had never thought, before, that he had spent any time on it at all — surely careless rock stars didn’t have to work at looking like careless rock stars — but now it was clear that spiky was its natural state and he took care to keep it from being that way. He wore only sweatpants. He looked more annoyed than alarmed.

  In a low voice several degrees closer to sleep than wakefulness, Cole said, “What the hell?”

  The three of us stood there, a bare-footed posse, and listened for another few minutes. There was nothing. Sam rubbed a hand through his hair, leaving it comically fanned. Cole held up a finger to his lips and pointed through the kitchen toward the garage door entrance. Sure enough, if I held my breath, I could still hear scuffling coming from that direction.

  Cole armed himself with the broom from beside the fridge. I opted for a knife from the wooden block on the counter. Sam gave us both bemused looks and went empty-handed.

  We stood outside the door, waiting for another noise. A moment later, another crash sounded out, this one louder than before, dinging off metal. Cole looked at me and raised his eyebrows, and at the same time, he opened the door and I reached in to hit the garage light.

  And there was:

  nothing.

  We looked at each other, mystified.

  Into the garage, I said, “Is there anybody in here?”

  Cole, sounding betrayed, said to Sam, “I can’t believe there was another car here all along and you didn’t tell me. ”

  The garage was, like most garages, filled to capacity with weird and smelly things that you didn’t want to keep in the house. Most of the space was filled by a crappy red BMW station wagon, dusty with the lack of use, but there were also the requisite lawn mower, a workbench covered with small metal soldiers, and a Wyoming license plate above the door that said BECK 89.

  My eyes were drawn back to the station wagon.

  I said, “Shh. Look!”

  There was a weed whacker leaning askew against the hood of the car. I stepped into the garage ahead of the boys to lean it back up, and then noticed the slightly ajar hood. I pressed an experimental hand on it. “Was this like this before?”

  “Yes. For the last decade,” Sam said, joining me. The BMW was not a thing of beauty, and the garage still smelled like whatever fluid it had been leaking last. He pointed to a crate of tools knocked over by the rear fender of the BMW. “That wasn’t like that, though. ”

  “Also,” Cole said, “listen. ”

  I heard what Cole had heard: a sort of scuffling underneath the car.

  I started down but Sam caught my arm and knelt down himself to look.

  “For crying out loud,” he said. “It’s a raccoon. ”

  “Poor thing,” I said.

  “It could be a rabid baby-killer,” Cole told me primly.

  “Shut up,” Sam said pleasantly, still peering under the vehicle. “I’m wondering how to get it out. ”

  Cole stepped past me, holding the broom like a staff. “I’m more interested in how it got in. ”

  He walked around the back of the car to the side door of the garage, which was slightly open. He tapped on the open door. “Sherlock found a clue. ”

  SAM

  I said, “Sherlock should figure out how to get this guy out. ”

  “Or girl,” Cole said, and Grace regarded him approvingly. Holding the knife from the kitchen, she looked stark and sexy and like someone I didn’t associate with her body. Her repartee with Cole maybe should’ve made me jealous, but instead it made me glad — evidence, more than anything else, that I was starting to think of Cole as a friend. Everyone harbored the secret fantasy that everyone who was friends with them would also be friends with each other.

  I padded to the front of the garage, grit pressing uncomfortably into the bottom of my bare feet, and tugged the garage door open. It rolled up into the ceiling with a terrific crash and the dark driveway with my Volkswagen spread out before me. It was an eerie and lonesome landscape. The cool night air, scented with new leaves and buds, bit at my arms and toes, and some potent combination of the cool breeze and the wide, wide night quickened my blood and called to me. I was momentarily lost with the force of my wanting.

  With some effort, I turned back to Cole and Grace. Cole was already poking experimentally around the bottom of the car with the broomstick, but Grace was looking out into the night with an expression that I felt mirrored mine. Something like contemplation and yearning. She caught me looking at her and her face didn’t change. I felt like — I felt like she knew how I felt. For the first time in a very long time, I remembered waiting in the woods for her to shift, waiting for us both to be wolves at the same time.

  “Come on, you bastard,” Cole said to the animal under the car. “I was having an excellent dream. ”

  “Should I be on the other side with something else?” Grace asked, her eyes on me just a second longer before she turned back.

  “A knife is a bit excessive,” I suggested, stepping away from the garage door. “There’s a push broom over there. ”

  She looked at the knife before setting it down on a birdbath — another failed grounds beautification attempt by Beck.

  “I hate raccoons,” observed Cole. “This is why your idea of moving the wolves is somewhat problematic, Grace. ”

  Grace, armed with a push broom, inserted the bristly end under the car with grim efficiency. “I hardly find this to be an apt comparison. ”

  I could see the masked nose of the raccoon poking out from under the BMW. In a sudden rush, it bolted away from Cole’s broomstick and ran directly by the open garage door to hide behind a watering can on the other side of the car.

  “Why, you dumb bastard,” Cole said wonderingly.

  Grace walked over and pushed on the watering can, gently. There was a moment’s hesitation, and the raccoon bolted directly back under the car. Again, completely bypassing the open door. Grace, an ardent disciple of logic, threw up her free hand. “The door is right there. It’s the entire wall. ”

  Cole, looking a bit more enthusiastic than the job called for, rummaged around beneath the car with the broomstick again. Duly terrified by this onslaught, the raccoon bolted back to the watering can. The smell of its fear was strong as the rank scent of its coat, and vaguely contagious.

  “This,” Cole said, the broomstick braced on the ground beside him, looking like Moses in sweatpants, “is the reason raccoons don’t take over the planet. ”

  “This,” I said, “is the reason we keep getting shot at. ”

  Grace looked down at the raccoon where it was huddled in the corner. Her expression was pitying. “No complicated logic. ”

  “No spatial sense,” I said. “Wolves have plenty of complicated logic. Just no human logic. No spatial sense. No sense of time. No sense of boundaries. Boundary Wood is too small for us. ”

  “So we move the wolves someplace better,” Grace said. “Someplace with a better human-to-acre ratio. Someplace with fewer Tom Culpepers. ”

  “There are always Tom Culpepers,” I said at the same time that Cole said it, and Grace smiled ruefully at both of us.

  “It would have to be pretty remote,” I said. “And it couldn’t be private property, unless it was ours, and I don’t think we’re that rich. And it couldn’t have existing wolves already, or there’s a good chance they’d kill a lot of us in the beginning. And there would have to be prey there, or we’d just die of starvation anyway. Plus, I’m not sure how you’d catch twenty-odd wolves. Cole’s been trying and he’s not had much luck even getting one. ”

  Grace ha
d her stubborn face on, which meant she was losing her sense of humor as well. “Better idea?”

  I shrugged.

  Cole scratched his bare chest with the end of the broomstick and said, “Well, you know, they’ve been moved before. ”

  He had both Grace’s and my undivided attention.

  Cole said, tone lazy, infinitely used to slowly doling out things other people wanted to hear, “Beck’s journal starts when he’s a wolf. But the journal doesn’t start in Minnesota. ”

  “Okay,” Grace said, “I’ll bite. Where?”

  Cole pointed the broomstick at the license plate above the door, BECK 89. “Then the real wolf population started to come back and, like Ringo here said, started killing the part-time wolves, and he decided their only option was to move. ”

  I felt an odd sense of betrayal. It wasn’t that Beck had ever lied to me about where he’d come from — I was sure I’d never asked him directly if he’d always been here in Minnesota. And it wasn’t like that license plate wasn’t in plain sight. It was just — Wyoming. Cole, benevolent interloper that he was, knew things about Beck that I didn’t. Part of me said it was because Cole had the balls to read Beck’s journal. But another part of me said that I shouldn’t have had to.

  “So does it say how he did it?” I asked.

  Cole gave me an odd look. “A little. ”

  “A little how?”

  “Only said that Hannah helped them a lot. ”

  “I’ve never heard of Hannah,” I said. I was aware that I sounded wary.

  “You wouldn’t have,” Cole said. Again he had that funny expression. “Beck said that she hadn’t been a wolf very long, but she couldn’t seem to stay human as long as the others. She stopped shifting that year after they moved. He said she seemed more capable of holding human thoughts when she was a wolf than the others. Not much. But remembered faces and returned to places she’d been as a human, but as a wolf. ”

  Now I knew why he was looking at me. Grace was looking at me, too. I looked away. “Let’s get this raccoon out of here. ”

  We stood there in silence for a few moments, a little trippy with sleep loss, until I realized that I heard movement from closer to me. I hesitated for a moment, my head cocked, listening to identify the source.

  “Oh, hey,” I noted. Crouched behind a plastic garbage can, right beside me, was a second, larger raccoon, looking up at me with leery eyes. Far better at hiding than the first one, obviously, as I had been completely unaware of its presence. Grace craned her neck, trying to see over the car what I was looking at.

  I didn’t have anything in my hands but my hands, so that’s what I used. I reached down and took the handle of the garbage can. And very slowly, I pushed it toward the wall, forcing the raccoon out the other side.

  Instantly, the raccoon tore along the wall and straight out the door into the night. No pause. Just straight out the garage door.

  “Two of them?” Grace asked. “Th —” She stopped as the first raccoon, inspired by the success of the escaping raccoon, bolted out after it, no detours to watering cans along the way.