Carl Wilson
Going out to look for Ivy and Ben was a mistake. A huge, huge mistake.
I thought it would quiet the wolf down, if I fed it just a little bit. Take some action instead of constant inaction. Fooling myself into thinking that if I know where they are, I can best distract the hunt for them in the opposite direction.
But the wolf has always been with me. I should know the wolf by now. Giving the wolf a little taste doesn’t satisfy it for a while. It doesn’t convince it to go lie down in a corner and rest.
A little taste is an appetizer for the wolf. It stimulates the hunger.
I constantly itch now. I swear that I spend every waking second hoping that nothing upsets me, because I’m so close to transforming.
“Hey, Carl,” Kate says, sitting down next to me, just an inch away. I put an arm around her shoulders and pull her close, rest my cheek on the top of her head for a second. She wiggles, playfully bumps her shoulder against my chest and shakes her head slowly, side to side, stroking her hair against my beard. We both sit back upright, and I take my hand off of her shoulder. That has become our greeting lately, since our physical attraction for each other has waned. It is a closer degree of friendship, maybe a placeholder to continue exploring a deeper connection someday. Most importantly, it is the only thing that really distracts me enough that I can stop worrying about the wolf for a couple of minutes.
Even if we never, ever go any farther with each other than these little companionable puppy-nuzzles, for the rest of my life, I will be in her debt for these small moments of peace she gives me every day. Even Kate notices the change in my posture and mood.
I see her mouth, “Get a room,” at me.
It’s been a couple of days since Ivy missed her big Honors Lit midterm. Nathan and Kate got into it with Grandma, but she somehow managed to convince them that she is well and that she trusts Ben. A lifetime of being the perfect student and perfect friend and perfect granddaughter just got to be too much for her all at once, and she just needs to get away for a while and not be perfect is the story she sold them. How she manages to do things like that, I’ll never know, but she somehow pulls it off.
The story has helped them move on from their intense anger and acute worry about Ivy into a more settled place. They very clearly miss her, and that colors their mood more than anything these days. The school is still holding an official story that Ivy is dealing with a family emergency out of state, and that it’s pure coincidence that Ben has just gone truant, but nobody else believes a word of it. They all know that Grandma is the only family Ivy has, and if she really were dealing with an emergency, she’s the type of girl that would still make a post online or get in touch with a friend every few days to reassure everybody that she was well. Kate and Nathan have been sharing out what Grandma has told them, and it seems the rest of the school is willing to accept that.
All of them – myself included, actually – have seen how hard Ivy has always worked at everything. We all admire her as somebody that is almost too good to be true. Brilliant, friendly, beautiful, compassionate, kind, strong. As I walk through the hallways at school, I see faces here and there that seem to envy what they think Ivy has done, just cast off all of their responsibility all at once and just run away for a while.
The difference between them and me is that I know that Ivy has not fled her responsibility. She’s fled a danger that none of them could even imagine. If I were to stop and tell any of these students, her vampire boyfriend has dragged her off to the woods to hide and protect her from even worse vampires, not a one of them would believe me.
Classes end for the day. I hope to get a chance to talk with Kate for a little while, but she begs off because she needs to hurry to work. I really needed that time with her, because an afternoon of all of my classes being tiresome and tedious has me just about vibrating with stress. The wolf can feel me weakening, and it starts pushing harder. As much as I would like to take the wooded path up the hill to my house, I know I can’t. Once I get away from pinkie eyes, out into places where I can smell the passage of possum, rabbits, and most tantalizingly, deer, the wolf is going to want to hunt. I haven’t let him out to hunt since just before Ivy and Ben ran. One whiff of deer, and I won’t be able to stop the change.
The long way up the valley wall it is, then. Four miles of switchbacks and narrow gravel shoulders. When I get up to my house, I’m tired from too many nights of the wolf raging in the cage inside the cell and the long walk. I’m tempted to just go inside and go to bed, but I’m not actually tired. I don’t want to go to the cage, either.
I realize that there is one person I can rely on to calm me when I’m having a rough time. The woman that’s been there for me since my fosters abandoned me here in Stokers Mill a few years ago. The one person here in town that knows what I am and what I’m felling right now.
Twenty minutes later, I’m pulling into Grandma and Ivy’s driveway. This time, she’s not expecting me, so there is not truck maintenance going on that just happens to need an extra pair of hands. I walk in, and she’s sitting in the den with an IM convo open on her laptop.
“Here for dinner?” she asks. “You know I always cook for three, whether I’m expecting you or not.”
“I’d really like that,” I say.
She gives me another look, this time studying my face. “Looks like you really need it,” she says. “Tell you what. The stuff in the oven will make fine leftovers, and I’ve got a couple of steaks I was going to cook up tomorrow.”
Rare steak. Grandma knows.
“Need any help?” I ask.
She actually shakes her finger at me, and says, “You know that you shouldn’t eat raw meat while pink. You just sit right down until I’ve at least threatened it with a hot pan.” The other thing Grandma does is very pointedly not offer me a beer. I appreciate both, because either one can cause my control to slip. I know Grandma loves me, but if I ever transformed in front of her because I’ve lost control, I don’t doubt that she’d take care of herself.
While waiting for dinner to cook, I idly tap out one of the few melodies I know on Ivy’s beautiful piano. Touching something that she has poured so much love into calms me a little bit. I know that my skill barely scratches the capabilities of the instrument, but in a way, touching something that Ivy creates such beauty out of brings me out of my immediate worries, and into memories of happier times, of all of the beautiful hours I’ve spent in this very den listening to her practice. I can’t help by remember sitting right where I am now, side by side with her while she looked at the ad for the piano. I pointed to the view out the bay windows, looking down over the majestic valley that Stokers Mill is nestled into. “Imagine what it will be like to sit here, and look up from your sheet music, and see this while you play?”
That moment might have been what convinced her to spend the money to buy it.
“Alright, Carl. Come and get it,” Grandma calls from the kitchen, interrupting my reminiscence.
The smell of the steak is so intoxicating that I have to force myself to sit down, pick up the fork and knife, and actually cut it up before eating it.
“Still having a rough time?” Grandma asks.
I don’t even have to answer her. She knows. She could tell the second I walked in the door.
“If you need to stay here tonight, you can,” she says.
I shake my head. I want to keep eating, but force myself to put the fork down. “Too much risk to you,” I say. “I can take better care of myself at home.”
“That’s not taking care of yourself, Carl. You’re beating yourself up worse than you can heal. You’re limping a bit, you’re favoring your right arm, and I can tell by the way you’re chewing that you’ve probably knocked out a couple of molars.”
“Well, I’m not hurting anybody else.”
She shakes her head. “Yeah, but you’re getting close, and you know it. That’s why you’re here right now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say, and go back to my meal. It’s sating my physical hunger, even if I can still feel the wolf pacing inside, snarling at the internal bars I’ve put around it to cage it in. It seems a little quieter, though. Maybe the proper food for my state, plus being around a place with such good memories, and Grandma’s calm nature are helping me turn the tide a bit.
“You really need to put Ivy out of your mind, not go out looking for them again,” she tells me.
“I’m not.”
“You have,” she says. “I know you have.”
“You don’t know what I do with my time.”
“Maybe I don’t. Finish that, so we can go to the den and watch the sunset together,” Grandma says. “If you want to stay the night then, you’re welcome to, but if you want to go home afterwards, I won’t stop you.”
“Deal,” I say, digging back into my food, not looking up until the plate is clean.
It’s only after we’ve cleaned up the kitchen a bit and we’re sitting in the den that I start to think about our conversation at dinner. Grandma seems unconcerned about being close to me when I’ve been struggling to hold back a transformation for days. She’s casually sipping her beer as if I were just any kid from town. I’ve got a cold soda, ice cubes clinking in the glass every time I take a sip.
“You said you know that I’ve gone out hunting Ivy and Ben. How?”
“I agreed with you, that maybe I don’t.”
“Please don’t mess with me,” I say.
“You spent an awful lot of time driving up and down one section of road a few days ago, and have driven by twice since then.”
“What?” I ask. There’s no way she can know that. Unless… “You put a tracker on my car?” I ask.
Grandma shakes her head.
“You need to stop it, Carl,” she says. “You told me about the sign Ben showed you. You know that you’re putting Ivy at risk by going out looking for them.”
“I can’t possibly be putting Ivy at risk by getting her away from him. There was another zombie out here sniffing around his place, not around here.”
“They’re looking for her,” Grandma says.
“How do you know that? Same way you know where I’m going? You got trackers on all the zombies in town, too?”
“I know,” she says.
I get up out of my seat and start pacing. I really want to just get into my car and leave, but the fact that Grandma is somehow monitoring it stops me. I’m furious at her for doing that to me.
“Is it even legal what you’ve done?” I ask.
“I haven’t done anything to your car,” she says.
I narrow my eyes at her. She seems to believe what she’s saying, but she’s not saying everything she knows.
“Carl, calm down. Just, let’s drop the subject and play some cards, and you stay here tonight, alright?”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I shout. “I’m tired of being calm and pretending I don’t know anything when I know exactly where she is. I’m tired of just sitting around while that bloodsucker is out there feeding on her and doing who knows what to her, all because he made some second-rate gang sign at me. You know that I can’t stand inaction,” I say, getting up real close to her, just about up in her face.
“Look, I love Ivy as much as you do. And you know I’m not weak and I’m not stupid, Carl. If I thought going out after her would be the best thing for her, you know I’d have done it. But right now, the safest place for her is with him. You’ve got to let it go, especially your jealousy about Ben.”
That last bit gets even deeper under my skin. I have accepted that she will never love me romantically. That’s not why her being out there with Ben bothers me now. It’s because he’s a vampire, not because he’s Ivy’s boyfriend and not me. “There’s one thing you’re pretty stupid about,” I say.
“You’re being stupid about everything,” Grandma says. “You’re an adult now, Carl. Stop using the wolf as an excuse to act like a child all the time.”
“A child?” I ask. I start mentally composing a list of all of the adult things I’m doing – good job, good grades, taking care of my own home without parents – but I don’t feel like arguing with her anymore. “I’m going home, because I’m even angrier now than when I got here.”
I see her face soften, her voice becomes gentler. “Promise me you’re going home, and I won’t stop you,” she says.
I stand there for a while, sniffing her out a bit. She seems willing to hold her end if I hold mine. She’s still holding something in reserve on me. There’s something she knows that I don’t.
“Promise,” I say. Whatever she’s got on my car, she’ll know if I go anywhere except home and stay there. I drop myself into the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition, but don’t start it up quite yet. I find I’m surprised the wolf has managed to stay down through all of this.
I feel so trapped right now because I know that if I go out after Ben and Ivy, there’s no way I’ll be able to out-drive Grandma getting there, and apparently she knows, because of me, where they are. She truly believes Ivy is safe as long as I go nowhere near her, so if I try, she’s going to stop me.
I take my phone out of my pocket and toss it into the cup holder, as I always do when I drive.
My phone. Long ago, Ivy and I had installed friend locaters on our phones so we could keep track at times when we were both busy and felt like we were constantly two ships passing in the night with each other. Ivy had left her phone behind when she ran off with Ben. The GPS on those things is really good these days. Mine can tell when I’ve changed lanes on the highway. I open the app, and zoom all the way in on the satellite view. Ivy’s phone is turned on, and is not on the side of the house where her bedroom is.
An hour later, my phone is in my basement, right outside the cell, and I am standing between the two white stones I’d found along the highway. I park my car and get out.
“This is exactly what I needed,” I say to myself, as I feel calmer than I have in a long time. The wolf is no longer howling to get out, no longer clawing at the bars of self-control I’ve caged it up with. Action. I’m taking action.
I see again the path that has been carefully cleared just enough to make it easier to pass through quickly and quietly, but not so much as to be obvious. I don’t take it, but do stalk down the slope, parallel to it. Pretty soon, I pick up the scent of wood smoke. I try to bring up the wolf just a little bit to help me figure out the direction it’s coming from, but it seems like it’s actually drowsy. I’ve never felt that before, but choose not to dwell on it quite yet. I’m close. Step by step, I silently creep down the slope a little farther, until I catch sight of a little, warm glow. It flickers very slightly. As I get closer, I see that it is a window into a room with a fire burning inside.