Chapter 11
ELEVEN
THEN: NOVEMBER, TWELVE YEARS AGO
Unsurprisingly, the rest of the night went poorly.
When the ambulance left, his parents crossed over to him, tight-lipped, their movements stiff. “Come on,” David said, hauled him into standing, “Let’s go home.”
Surely, he and Mara had driven to the event—Sam knew they had, having seen them leave in the car what felt like an eon before—but all three of them walked home.
At the time Sam had thought it was a punishment, that he hadn’t deserved a ride after what he’d done.
Looking back now, he wonders if it wasn’t just the thick cloud of shared shock.
Whatever it was, they walked in painful, loaded silence, and when they did get into the house, all Mara said was, “We’ve checked you and you’re not hypothermic or concussed; that’s good. Still, you should get some rest. Clean yourself up and go to your room, Sam.”
“I should explain,” Sam said. His tongue, he remembers, felt strange in his mouth, too heavy and ill-fitting, as though it had been swapped out for someone else’s. “It wasn’t… I wasn’t really—”
“I said,” Mara ground out, “clean yourself up, and go to your room.”
So Sam cleaned himself up and went to his room.
He got in bed. He didn’t sleep. For a while, he listened to the muted sounds of his parents arguing, the words inaudible, but the rising and falling tones suggesting raw unhappiness.
Then the noise stopped and was replaced by the soft song of the night: crickets playing their low violins, frogs croaking in the nearby pond.
Sam listened to that, too. He tried, as hard as he could, not to think about anything at all.
Around four in the morning, he got out of bed, walked silently down the hall to the bathroom, and threw up neatly and without fuss.
If he cried, he didn’t notice. Not because he didn’t want to cry, not because he wasn’t ripped apart with remorse and regret, but because what had happened was still too incomprehensible for tears.
A real part of him was convinced that if he could just fall asleep, he’d wake up to the blissful realization that it had all been a horrible dream.
But it hadn’t all been a horrible dream.
Personhood is an exercise of chance and probability, every life a single marble sent rolling down a hill, and any little bump or twig might be the one that sends it careening down a totally different path.
It was a hard truth to learn so entirely at seventeen.
Even now, looking back, Sam doesn’t quite feel old enough to know it.
Certainly, it kept him up that night, and because he didn’t sleep, he didn’t get the chance to awaken, relieved, in his familiar, undamaged world. Instead he walked downstairs the next morning hollowed out, trapped in the hideous new one.
David and Mara were at the breakfast table, stone-cold and silent.
Neither one of them would meet Sam’s eye.
He tried, with increasing desperation, to tell them the real story.
It was clear that with every word he said, they believed him less.
Numbly, he realized that this, too, was a cost of having spun a web of intricate lies; the damn things had a half-life, still breaking down months after he’d abandoned the practice entirely.
But the trust that had eroded away, bit by bit without Sam’s even noticing, was gone now, lost seemingly beyond rescue or repair.
The knowledge came upon him wholly, a perfect, unbroken understanding that had arrived far too late.
Sam doesn’t remember now what else they talked about at that breakfast, if they talked about anything.
All he remembers is thinking that he didn’t care what they did to him, that nothing could be worse than what had already happened, and then how much he’d regretted, later, ever having had that stupid thought.
And he remembers that they were interrupted before he could clear up by the sound of tires squealing, a car door slamming, and someone bellowing in what sounded like rage from the front yard.
“Oh, God,” Mara said, her already pinched expression tightening even further, as David sighed and got up to answer the door.
She glared at Sam as she rubbed at a temple and snapped, “Do you see? Do you see the impact your behavior has on this family? I doubt whoever is out there on the lawn is screaming about me! Or your father! Or your sisters!”
“I know,” Sam said, his head hanging, shame burning within him like a trash fire: all noxious gases and greasy, lingering fumes. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. I was trying to do the right thing—”
“By stealing a car, Sam? Exactly how much of a moron do you think I—”
But she stopped, because David had opened the front door, and the screaming outside had become both louder and more intelligible.
“You get him out here right now!” This voice was clearly Mr. Thompson, and Sam was surprised by how terrifying he found it.
Usually, observing as an outsider, he thought the man’s tantrums were a little pathetic, and sometimes wondered why Jake seemed so cowed by them.
But being the target of his ire, knowing all that raw, uncontrolled rage was being directed at him, made Sam freeze in his seat as though glued to the cushioning.
Mrs. Thompson’s voice filtered back into the dining room, trailing his thinly, like a wisp of smoke. “Patrick, honey, please, let’s just calm down and talk about this. The neighbors are coming out now; they’re all going to see—”
“I don’t give a good goddamn about the neighbors!” Patrick was roaring now, so loud that Mara winced, and then glanced at Sam, and then sighed and pushed back her chair, stood up. “Let them all see! Let them all stand here and watch as I give that little pissant what’s coming to him—”
“Whoa now.” That was David, the calm, even voice Sam had heard him use dozens of times on unruly patients while Sam was, secretly and very much without official permission, hanging around the ER during his shifts. “I understand we’re all upset here, but let’s not escalate to threats.”
“Oh, he doesn’t want me to escalate,” Patrick snarled. “Do you hear that, Laur? He doesn’t want me to escalate!”
“I think the whole neighborhood’s heard now, Pat,” Lauren said. There was an edge of despair in her voice that rendered it almost unfamiliar, even though Sam must have heard her speak a hundred times before. “Let’s just go home, or back to the hospital. This isn’t going to fix anything.”
“Who’s trying to fix anything?” Patrick’s voice grew, somehow, even louder: “I know you’re in there, Sam! If you’re old enough to steal from me, then you’re old enough to face me like a man!”
“He’s seventeen.” That was Mara, clipped and cold. “And he took your stupid, ugly car for a joyride around the lake, not to a chop shop—”
“Stupid?!” Patrick’s incredulous rage cracked through the word, splintering it. “Ugly?!”
“—and the important thing,” Mara continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, “is what happened to your son, which I’m sure we can all agree we feel sick about. But it was an accident—”
“Oh, a likely story—”
“And I know Sam’s very sorry—”
“But not sorry enough to face the consequences, eh?”
“Sorrier, actually,” said Sam quietly, stepping past his parents to stand before the mottled, furious Patrick Thompson. “Sorrier than I’ve ever been about anything in my life.”
Far from looking mollified, the apology seemed to further enrage Patrick.
Then again, maybe it was just the sight of Sam that fanned the flame of his anger; Sam certainly wouldn’t have blamed him.
Or… looking back as an adult, Sam can’t ignore the uncomfortable possibility that perhaps the man was just very upset, reeling after a series of blows that might have thrown off anyone’s equilibrium, and had seized with relief the nearest available lightning rod.
Whatever the reason, Patrick snarled, “You should be sorry,” as he stepped forward, jabbing a finger hard into Sam’s chest and then repeating the gesture occasionally for emphasis. “You stole my car. You drove it into the lake! You ruined my son’s life!”
“Patrick!” It was the angriest Sam had ever heard Jake’s mother; she sounded near tears. “Don’t—how could you say—Jake’s life isn’t ruined.”
“Oh, no, of course not.” Patrick’s voice was sharp and bitter.
“He’s going to go off to study ballet at Juilliard next fall, just like he wanted!
A completely pulverized ankle won’t impact that at all!
Those severed ligaments and crushed bones?
No big deal! The surgeries and physical therapy and years of rehab he has coming to him definitely won’t be an issue.
Shouldn’t be any kind of problem that his doctors don’t know if he’ll ever be able to walk on it again! ”
At this point, Sam began to feel as though he might throw up in sheer horror for the second time in less than twelve hours. Not thinking about it, his body making the call for him, he crouched down and put his head between his knees.
This was a mistake. A moment later Sam was being grabbed by the collar of his T-shirt and hauled upright, held an inch from Patrick’s now-purpled face.
Everyone was screaming—Patrick demanding to know what right Sam had to collapse when this was his fault, Lauren begging Patrick to let Sam go, David threatening to call the police, Mara shrilly insisting Sam was only a child.
And Sam could have shouted, too. He could have told Patrick that Jake had stolen the car, that Jake had been drunk, that both of those things had happened as a direct result of Patrick’s own actions.
He could have explained that he’d only taken the driver’s seat so Jake wouldn’t crash it himself; he could have pointed out that the other driver was at fault, and that he couldn’t have prevented it no matter how desperately he’d wanted to.
But he hadn’t. He’d watched, instead, as Patrick pulled back his fist, and then he’d turned his head, waiting for the blow.
He knew to his bones he deserved it; he wanted Patrick to hit him.
Anything to make his outside match what churned within.
Anything to feel like he was receiving some sort of just punishment for his unthinkable crime.
Patrick didn’t hit him, though. In the end, after a hanging second, he muttered, “Saints above, what am I doing?” and let Sam go.
And then… Sam had never seen anything quite like it, the way all the fight seemed to drain away from him, leaving something behind smaller and less certain than the Mr. Thompson who’d stormed out of the house the evening before.
Some of the man’s commanding presence was whittled away there before Sam’s eyes on the doorstep, leaving him looking old. Sallow. Lost.
“You’ll hear from our lawyers,” he said, but it didn’t sound like a threat so much as a weary promise. “Let’s go, Lauren. Let’s go.”
Sam and his parents stood there together and watched them walk down the drive, climb back into Patrick’s Mercedes, peel away. Normally, David would have made a crack about the wasted opportunity to simply walk around the block; he didn’t. None of them said anything at all until:
“Sam, I would like you to go upstairs, and pack an overnight bag, and get in the car.” Mara’s voice was calm and dead and empty, a forest after a fire. “Right now, please.”
Sam blinked at her, surprised. “Where—?”
“I said,” Mara said, in that same blank voice, “right now, please.”
It was a tone he’d never heard her use before, and it scared him; he didn’t argue.
He went upstairs and packed a bag, and then, at her instruction, he got in the car.
His father, as they passed, said, “Mara, where are you—” and then, silenced by a sharp look, stayed in the kitchen, looking sorrowfully after them.
The drive was silent, too, not even music.
Sam tried to break it a few times, but every time he did his mother’s knuckles grew a little whiter on the steering wheel, so he stopped.
The previous day’s gray weather had given way to a sharp, sparkling snow, the kind that felt like knives in the wind and glittered like sequins as it fell.
Each flake looked as brittle as Sam felt, as Mara seemed, as the energy between them had palpably become.
He was pleased, horribly, when they pulled up to Silverman’s. He always had been, all his life. And he was pleased, as his mother dragged him inside by the sleeve, to see Deb behind the counter. That, too, had been true all his life.
But his pleasure had evaporated when Mara snarled, “Well! You know what, Deb? You were right! I was an unfit parent for him, just like you said, and I ruined him, just like you said, and it nearly got him killed, just like you said! And, as a bonus, he’s become a monster, just like you might as well have said, so you know what!
Fine! My bad! You do it. You get him through high school, if you think you know so much better than I do! I give up!”
“Mara,” Deb said, wide-eyed, glancing between the two of them. “For God’s sake, what are you even saying? Let’s just talk for a second. What the hell happened?”
“Ask him,” Mara said, her voice tight in a way it would take Sam years to realize meant she was holding back tears. “Ask him; I can’t—” and then she was gone, turning on her heel and storming out of the deli without even saying goodbye.
Deb hadn’t asked him, though. She’d taken one look at his face, pulled his bag from his hands, dropped it on the counter, and given him a hug. It was then—and only then—that Sam cried.