I drowned in the questions until the light failed. Hours gone, like I’d shifted, but I’d never left my own skin. It had been years since I’d lost time like this.
Once upon a time, that was my life. I used to look out the window for hours at a time, until my legs fell asleep beneath me. It was when I first came to Beck — I must’ve been eight or so, not long after my parents had left me with my scars. Ulrik sometimes picked me up under my armpits and pulled me back toward the kitchen and a life occupied by other people, but I was a silent, quivering participant. Hours, days, months gone, lost to another place that admitted neither Sam nor wolf. It was Beck who finally broke the spell.
He had offered me a tissue; it was a strange enough gift that it brought me to the present. Beck waved it at me again. “Sam. Your face.”
I touched my cheeks; they weren’t so much damp as sticky with the memory of continuous tears. “I wasn’t crying,” I told him.
“I know you weren’t,” Beck replied.
While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell you something? There are a lot of empty boxes in your head, Sam.”
I looked at him, quizzical. Again, it was a strange enough concept to hold my attention.
“There are a lot of empty boxes in there, and you can put things in them.” Beck handed me another tissue for the other side of my face.
My trust of Beck at that point was not yet complete; I remember thinking that he was making a very bad joke that I wasn’t getting. My voice sounded wary, even to me. “What kinds of things?”
“Sad things,” Beck said. “Do you have a lot of sad things in your head?”
“No,” I said.
Beck sucked in his lower lip and released it slowly. “Well, I do.”
This was shocking. I didn’t ask a question, but I tilted toward him.
“And these things would make me cry,” Beck continued. “They used to make me cry all day long.”
I remembered thinking this was probably a lie. I could not imagine Beck crying. He was a rock. Even then, his fingers braced against the floor, he looked poised, sure, immutable.
“You don’t believe me? Ask Ulrik. He had to deal with it,” Beck said. “And so you know what I did with those sad things? I put them in boxes. I put the sad things in the boxes in my head, and I closed them up and I put tape on them and I stacked them up in the corner and threw a blanket over them.”
“Brain tape?” I suggested, with a little smirk. I was eight, after all.
Beck smiled, a weird private smile that, at the time, I didn’t understand. Now I knew it was relief at eliciting a joke from me, no matter how pitiful the joke was. “Yes, brain tape. And a brain blanket over the top. Now I don’t have to look at those sad things anymore. I could open those boxes sometime, I guess, if I wanted to, but mostly I just leave them sealed up.”
“How did you use the brain tape?”
“You have to imagine it. Imagine putting those sad things in the boxes and imagine taping it up with the brain tape. And imagine pushing them into the side of your brain, where you won’t trip over them when you’re thinking normally, and then toss a blanket over the top. Do you have sad things, Sam?”
I could see the dusty corner of my brain where the boxes sat. They were all wardrobe boxes, because those were the most interesting sort of boxes — tall enough to make houses with — and there were rolls and rolls of brain tape stacked on top. There were razors lying beside them, waiting to cut the boxes and me back open.
“Mom,” I whispered.
I wasn’t looking at Beck, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow.
“What else?” he asked, barely loud enough for me to hear. “The water,” I said. I closed my eyes. I could see it, right there, and I had to force out the next word. “My …” My fingers were on my scars.
Beck reached out a hand toward my shoulder, hesitant. When I didn’t move away, he put an arm around my back and I leaned against his chest, feeling small and eight and broken.
“Me,” I said.
Beck was silent for a long moment, hugging me. With my eyes closed, it seemed like his heartbeat through his wool sweater was the only thing in the world — and then he said, “Put everything in boxes but you, Sam. You we want to keep. Promise me you’ll stay out here with us.”
We sat like that for a long while, and when we stood up, all my sad things were in boxes, and Beck was my father.
Now, I went outside to the wide, ancient stump in the backyard, and I lay down on it so I could see the stars above me. Then I closed my eyes and slowly put my worries into boxes, one by one, sealing them up. Cole’s self-destruction in one, Tom Culpeper in another. Even Isabel’s voice got a box, because I just couldn’t deal with it right now.
With each box, I felt a little lighter, a little more able to breathe.
The one thing I couldn’t bring myself to put away was the sadness of missing Grace. That I kept. I deserved that. I’d earned it.
And then I just lay out there on the stump.
I had work in the morning, so I should have been sleeping, but I knew what would happen: Every time I closed my eyes, my legs would ache like I’d been running and my eyelids would twitch like they should be open and I’d remember that I needed to add names to the contacts in my cell phones and I’d think that really, one day, I should fold that load of laundry that I’d run a week ago.
Also, I’d think about how I really needed to talk to Cole.
The stump was wide enough in diameter that my legs only jutted over the side a foot or so; the tree — actually two of them grown together — must have been enormous when it had stood. It had black scars on it where Paul and Ulrik had used it as a base to set off fireworks. I used to count the age rings when I was younger. It had lived longer than any of us.
Overhead, the stars were wheeling and infinite, a complicated mobile made by giants. They pulled me amongst them, into space and memories. Lying on my back reminded me of being attacked by the wolves, long ago, when I’d been someone else. One moment I was alone, my morning and my life stretched out in front of me like frames in a film, each second only slightly different from the last. A miracle of seamless, unnoticed metamorphosis. And in the next moment, there were wolves.
I sighed. Overhead, satellites and planes moved effortlessly between the stars; a bank of clouds gestating lightning moved slowly in from the northwest. My mind flitted restlessly between the present — the ancient tree stump pressing sharply against my shoulder blades — and the past — my backpack crushed beneath me as the wolves pushed my body into a bank of snow left by the plow. My mother had armored me in a blue winter coat with white stripes on the arms and mittens too fluffy for finger movement.