Beck swallowed again. When he looked back up at me, his expression was a white flag. Surrendering the truth. Offering himself up for judgment. He said, “Ulrik was driving.”
I heard myself make a sound — barely audible — as I turned my face away. I wanted to get one of my boxes out of my head and climb into it, but Beck was the one who had told me about the boxes in the first place. So instead, I had this. Me lying in the snow with my skin gaping at the sky and there was a wolf, and it was Beck.
I couldn’t think of it.
I couldn’t stop thinking of it.
I closed my eyes, and it was still there.
A touch on my elbow made my eyes open. It was Grace, looking carefully at my face, holding my elbow as if it were made of glass.
“Ulrik was driving,” Beck said again, and his voice got a little louder. “Paul and I were the wolves. I — I didn’t trust Ulrik to stay focused. Paul didn’t want to do it. I bullied him. I know you don’t have to forgive me. I haven’t. No matter how much right I do after that, what I did to you will always have been wrong.” He stopped. Took a long, shaky breath.
I didn’t know this Beck.
Grace whispered in my ear, “At least look at him, Sam. You don’t know when you’ll see him again.”
Because she asked, I looked at him.
“When I thought you didn’t have another year, I —” Beck didn’t finish. He shook his head, like clearing his thoughts. “I never thought that the woods would take you before me. And now I had to do it again — find someone to take care of us. But, listen to me, Sam. I tried to do it right this time.”
He was still watching me for a reaction. I didn’t have one. I was apart from this. I was somewhere else. I could find, if I tried now, a collection of words to pull into lyrics. Something that would remove me from this moment and take me somewhere else.
Beck saw it. He knew me, like no one else knew me, not even Grace, yet. He said, “Don’t — Sam. Don’t go away. Listen: I have to tell you this. I had eleven years worth of memories to reenact, Sam, eleven years of the look on your face every time you realized you were about to shift. Eleven years of you asking me if you really had to do it this year. Eleven years of —”
He stopped then, and put his hand over his mouth, shaking fingers holding his jaw. He was so much less than the Beck I’d last seen. This was not the Beck of summer. This was the Beck of a dying year. There was none of the power in his body now; it was all in his eyes.
Suddenly, Cole’s voice punched through the room. “Sam, you know I was trying to kill myself when he found me. I was getting really good at it, too.” His eyes were on me, a challenge, unflinching. “I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for him. He didn’t force me. Victor, either. We both chose it. It wasn’t like you.”
I knew this was true. I knew that there had been and probably always would be two Coles: the Cole who silenced the crowd with a smile and the Cole who whispered songs about finding his Alps. And I knew that Beck, somehow, in pulling Cole from the stage, had unearthed that second, quieter Cole, and given him a chance to live.
And me, too. Beck had bitten me, but it had been my parents, not him, who’d destroyed me. I had come to him as a crushed piece of paper that he had slowly smoothed. It wasn’t just Cole that he’d rebuilt.
There were so many different versions of him. It was countless versions of a song, and they were all the original, and they were all true, and they were all right. It should have been impossible. Was I supposed to love them all?
“Okay,” Beck said, voice taking a moment to solidify. “Okay. If I only have ten minutes, Sam, this is what I want to say. You’re not the best of us. You’re more than that. You’re better than all of us. If I only have ten minutes, I would tell you to go out there and live. I’d say … please take your guitar and sing your songs to as many people as you can. Please fold a thousand more of those damn birds of yours. Please kiss that girl a million times.”
Beck suddenly broke off and ducked his head down to his knees; he clenched his hands on the back of his skull. I saw the muscles in his back twitching. Not lifting his head, he whispered, “And please forget all about me. I wish I had been better, but I wasn’t. Please forget about me.”
His hands were still white-knuckled fists on the back of his head.
So many ways to say good-bye.
I said, “I don’t want to.”
Beck lifted his head. His pulse was beating visibly in his neck, fast and hard.
Grace let go of me, and I knew that she meant to send me off, down the stairs. She was right. I went down the stairs, two at a time. Beck tried to stand, unsuccessfully, at the same time that I knelt swiftly down to meet him. Our foreheads were almost touching. Beck was shivering, hard.
So many days before this, it had been Beck crouching to meet me, me shivering on the floor.
I felt as unsteady as Beck, just then. It was like I’d unfolded all my paper crane memories and found something unfamiliar printed on them. Somehow along the way, hope had been folded into one of those birds. My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.
I was done being afraid. It had started that night, me and my guitar in the bathtub, and it would end with me disappearing into a wolf again. I wouldn’t be afraid.
“Dammit,” Beck whispered, soft as a sigh. The heat was losing its grip on him. We were forehead to forehead again, father and son, Beck and Sam, the way it had always been. He was every devil and every angel.
I said, “Tell me you want us to cure you.”
Beck’s fingertips were white and then red, pushed against the floor. “Yes,” he said quietly, and I knew he was saying it for me, just me. “Do what it takes.” He looked up at Cole. “Cole, you are —”
And then his skin tore, violently, and I leaped to push the heater out of his way before Beck crashed to the floor, jerking.
Cole stepped forward and pushed a second needle into the crook of Beck’s arm.
And in that split second, as Beck’s face turned toward the ceiling, his eyes unchanging, I saw my own face.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
COLE
EPINEPHRINE/PSEUDOEPHEDRINE MIX 7
METHOD: INTRAVENOUS INJECTION
RESULT: SUCCESSFUL
(SIDE EFFECTS: NONE)
(NOTE: ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS STILL DICTATE SHIFT BACK TO WOLF)