Above us, the lights shimmered and changed. They had no beginning or end, but it looked like they were leaving us anyway. I thought again about the mud beneath his fingernails, the abrasion on his temple. What else had happened while I’d been in the woods?
“I missed having my face,” I said. In my head, it had seemed like it would be funny, but when I said it, neither of us laughed. Sam took his hand back and lifted his eyes to the aurora borealis. Sam was still looking off into the sky like he was thinking of nothing, and suddenly I realized, I was being cruel, not saying anything lovey to him after he had said it to me, not saying anything that he needed after being gone for so long. But the moment to say something right back was gone, and I didn’t know how to say something that wouldn’t sound corny. I thought about saying I love you to him, but even thinking about saying it out loud made me feel strange. I didn’t know why it should; I did love him, so much it hurt.
But I didn’t know how to say that. So I held out my hand, and Sam took it.
SAM
Outside of the car, the lights were even more dazzling, as if the cold air around us moved and shimmered with violet and pink. I stretched my free hand above me as if I could brush the aurora. It was cold, but a good cold, the sort that made you feel alive. Over our heads, the sky was so clear that we could see every star that could see us. Now that I had kissed Grace, I couldn’t stop thinking about touching her. My mind was full of the places I had yet to touch: the soft skin inside the bend of her elbow, the curve right above her hip bone, the line of her collarbone. I wanted to kiss her again, so badly, I wanted more of her, but instead, we held hands, our heads tipped back, and together we slowly turned, looking up into the infinity. It was like falling, or like flying.
I was torn between wanting to rush out of this moment, toward that more, and wanting to stay in it, living in a state of constant anticipation and constant safety. As soon as we stepped back into the house, the hunt of the wolves would become a real thing again, and I wasn’t ready.
Grace, out of the blue, asked, “Sam, are you going to marry me?”
I jerked, looking over at her, but she was still gazing up into the stars as if she’d merely asked about the weather. Her eyes, however, had a sort of hard, squinty look about them that belied the nonchalant sound of her voice.
I didn’t know what she expected me to say. I felt like laughing out loud. Because I realized all in a rush that of course she was right — yes, the woods would claim her for the cold months, but she wasn’t dying; I hadn’t lost her for good. And I had her right here, now. In comparison, everything else seemed small, manageable, secondary.
Suddenly the world seemed like a promising, friendly place. Suddenly I saw the future, and it was a place I wanted to be.
I realized that Grace was still waiting for an answer. I pulled her closer, until we were nose to nose under the northern lights. “Are you asking?” I said.
“Just clarifying,” Grace replied. But she was smiling, a tiny, genuine smile, because she had already read my thoughts. By her temple, little flyaway blond hairs drifted in the breeze; they looked like they must tickle, but she didn’t twitch. “I mean, instead of living in sin.”
And then I did laugh, even though the future was a dangerous place, because I loved her, and she loved me, and the world was beautiful and awash with pink light around us.
She kissed me, very lightly. “Say okay.” She was starting to shiver.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.”
It felt like a physical thing, held in my hands.
“Do you really mean it?” she asked. “Don’t say it if you don’t really mean it.”
My voice didn’t sound as earnest as I felt. “I really mean it.”
“Okay,” Grace said, and just like that, she seemed content and solid, certain of my affections. She gave a little sigh and rearranged our hands so that our fingers were intertwined. “Now you can take me home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
SAM
Back at home, Grace fell into my bed and asleep at about the same moment, and I envied her easy friendship with slumber. She lay motionless in the eerie, deathlike sleep of the exhausted. I couldn’t join her; everything inside me was awake. My mind was on continuous playback, giving me the events of the day again and again, until they seemed like one long creation, impossible to pull apart into separate minutes.
So I left her upstairs and made my soft way downstairs. In the kitchen, I dug through my pocket to drop my car keys on the counter. It seemed wrong that the kitchen looked the same. Everything should’ve looked different after tonight. A television humming upstairs was the only indication that Cole was in residence; I was glad for the solitude. I was filled with so much happiness and sadness that I couldn’t think of speaking. I could still feel the shape of Grace’s face pressed into my neck and see her face when she gazed up at the stars, waiting for my answer. I wasn’t ready, yet, to dilute that by speaking out loud.
Instead, I sloughed off my jacket and went to the living room — Cole had left this television on, too, though it was muted, so I switched it off and found my guitar where I’d left it leaning against the armchair. The body of it was a bit grubby from being outside; there was a new nick in the finish where either Cole or I had been too careless with it.
Sorry, I thought, because I still didn’t want to speak out loud. I picked the strings softly; the change in temperature from outside to inside had put it a little bit out of tune, but not as much as I would have thought. It was still playable, though I took the moment to make it perfect. I put the strap over my head, familiar and easy as a favorite shirt, and I remembered Grace’s smile.
Then I began to play. Variations on a G major chord, the most wonderful chord known to mankind, infinitely happy. I could live inside a G major chord, with Grace, if she was willing. Everything uncomplicated and good about me could be summed up by that chord. It was the second chord Paul had ever taught me, sitting here on that ancient plaid couch. First chord: E minor. “Because,” Beck had said, passing through the room, quoting one of his favorite movies, a memory that stung a little now, “into every life, a little rain must fall.”
“Because,” corrected Paul, “into every song, we must have a minor bridge.”
Dire E minor was straightforward for a newbie like myself. It was so much harder to play the halcyon G major. But Paul made the cheerfulness seem effortless.
It was that Paul I remembered right now, not the Paul who had pinned me to the snow as a child. Just like it was the Grace that slept upstairs that I remembered now, not the wolf with her eyes that we had found in the sinkhole.
I had spent so much of life being afraid or living in the memory of being afraid.
No more.
I stepped my fingers all around the chord as I walked down the hallway, toward the bathroom. The light was already on, so I didn’t have to stop playing as I stood there, looking at the bathtub at the other side of the room.
Darkness pressed on either side of my vision, memories pushing at me. I kept playing my guitar, plucking a song about the present to shove back the past. I stood there, eyes fixed on the empty tub.
Water tipped and steadied
washed with blood
The weight of the guitar’s shoulder strap grounded me. The pressure of the strings against my fingers held me in the here and now. Upstairs, Grace slept.
I took a step into the bathroom; my reflection in the mirror startled me as it moved. I held still to study myself. Was that my face, now?
water snaking up the fabric of my shirt
this is not sam
three two
I walked my fingers up to a C major. Filled my head with everything I could do with that chord: She came to me in summer, my lovely summer girl. I held on to the words Grace had said earlier. Are you going to marry me?
Grace had done so much of the work, saving me. Now it was time to save myself.
My fingers never stilled as I walked toward the tub, my guitar singing if I wouldn’t, and I stood by the bathtub, looking in. For a moment, it was just an ordinary, mundane object, just a dry basin waiting to be filled.
Then my ears began to ring.
I saw my mother’s face.
I couldn’t do this.
My fingers found G major and they played one thousand variations of it without me, songs they could play while my thoughts ran to other things. Songs that were a piece of something bigger than me, some unending reservoir of happiness that anyone could tap.
I hesitated, my chords echoing off the tile back at me. The walls were close around me; the doorway seemed far behind me.
I stepped into the bathtub, my shoes squeaking softly on the dry surface. My heart hammered against my T-shirt. Bees hummed inside my head. One thousand minutes other than this one lived in here: minutes with razors, minutes where everything that was me gurgled down the drain, minutes with hands pinning me in the water. But there was also Grace holding my head above the surface, Grace’s voice calling me back to myself, Grace taking me by the hand.
And more important than all of those was this minute. The minute when I, Sam Roth, had come here under my own power, my music held in my hands, strong, finally, strong.
Rilke said:
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
That was how Cole found me, an hour later. Sitting cross-legged in the empty bathtub, my guitar in my lap, my fingers teasing out a G major chord, singing a song I’d never sung before.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SAM
wake me up
wake me up, you said
but I was sleeping, too
I was dreaming
but now I’m waking up
still waking up
I can see the sun
CHAPTER THIRTY
GRACE
I was wide awake.
Everything in the room was still and black, and I was sure I had just been dreaming of exactly this moment, only with someone standing by the bed.
“Sam?” I whispered, thinking that it had been only minutes I’d been sleeping, that he’d woken me up when he came to bed.
From behind me, I heard Sam make a low-pitched sleep sound. I could feel, now, that it was not blankets pushed up against me but instead a Sam-blanket. Under normal circumstances, this small gift of his presence would have thrilled me and then lured me back to sleep, but I was so certain that someone had been standing by the bed that it was disconcerting to realize that he was firmly entrenched next to me instead. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, wary. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, Sam’s paper cranes became visible, swaying and tipping, moved by an invisible wind.
I heard a sound.
It wasn’t quite a crash. It was an interrupted crash, like something falling and being caught. I held my breath, listening — it was coming from somewhere downstairs — and was rewarded with another muffled thump. The living room? Something knocking something over in the backyard?
“Sam, wake up,” I said urgently. Looking over, I had a disorienting jolt when I saw the reflections of Sam’s eyes in the darkness beside me; he was already awake and was silent. Listening, like me.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered.
He nodded. I didn’t so much see it as hear his head rubbing on the pillowcase behind him.