31. I’ll Show You
I’ll Show You
ELLIE
Iwas awoken sometime in the early hours by a loud thud. I jolted upright, panic twisting my gut. Flying out of bed, I checked Henry and Tommy’s rooms. They were both still fast asleep. That’s when I realized the sound had come from upstairs.
Only slightly less concerned now, I jogged up the steps and ran down the hall to the living room, flicking on the hallway light as I went.
Sam was thrashing around in his sleep. The glass of water I’d left for him was upended on the floor, water soaking the rug.
“Sam!” I dropped to my knees, gripping him by the shoulders. In the faint glow of the light, his eyes were clenched shut, brows slanted, jaw tight. He looked like he was in pain.
“Sam, I’m here!”
It took me shaking him for him to finally blink his eyes awake. He lifted his head up, eyes jerking around the room.
Finally they landed on me. “Ellie.” His voice cracked. Then he sat up, grabbing the monitor for the front door. “Tommy! Is he—did he—”
“Tommy’s here. He’s asleep.”
He fell back on the pillow. “Fuck, I’m so sorry, Ellie. I fell asleep.”
“It’s okay.”
“No it’s not. I had one job.”
He was distraught.
“Sam. It’s okay.” I wiped his hair from his forehead. He was sweating. Trembling, I realized, as I pressed my fingers to his.
He pulled my hand into his, squeezing it as he met my eyes before letting it go. “I’m okay. You should go back to bed. I can stay up now.”
He tried to sit.
“No.” I placed my hand on his chest. His heartbeat skipped fast under my palm. I gently guided him back down. “Tommy’s okay. We talked. He’s going to come talk to you in the morning.”
I kept my hand on his chest a moment, not wanting to leave his beating heart. “What happened, Sam? What were you dreaming about?”
Sam swallowed, his eyes on mine. “I dreamed about the time we were apart, Ellie.”
He said it like the first time we were together and now was a continuous thing, only with an interruption. Out of nowhere, I remembered his parting words to me in that hotel room.
I’m going to show up for you.
“What happened?” I whispered. “Where did you go?”
He held my gaze a moment longer, then pressed a hand over mine on his chest. With his other, he lifted his hand to cup my face. I leaned into his palm, my heart feeling like it was sliding across a hot surface with no edge. Like soon it would fall away and I’d never get it back.
“I’ll show you,” Sam said, his voice gravelly.
I held my breath.
He seemed to hesitate, then he reached his hands down to his belt buckle.
My stomach seized. It must have shown on my face because he laughed softly. “Not that.”
His smile fell away though as he undid his pants and slipped one side of his jeans down, as well as his briefs underneath. I couldn’t help the swoop of my stomach at seeing this private corner of his body.
But what he’d revealed wasn’t salacious. It was a pink, puckered scar, the size of a quarter.
“That’s where the bullet went through,” he said.
My stomach plunged. “Bullet?”
He turned so he was lying sideways on the couch, sliding his pants down more to reveal an angry red line that disappeared almost down his thigh.
“That’s where they did the surgery to fix it.”
I was quiet, staring, my mind spinning. He didn’t have these scars the last time I’d seen this part of his body. In between then and now, Sam had been shot. Had surgery.
It was then that he told me the whole story.
Less than a month after that fateful night together, right around the time I realized my somewhat irregular period was seriously late, Sam was shot and left to die.
He told me about his friends. How they hadn’t made it.
How he didn’t know any more about their story now than he did then.
He kept pausing, skating over details, and I told him I was okay with hearing it all.
I wanted him to share everything; for me to relieve his suffering by bearing witness to his telling of it.
So he did. He told me the details that haunted him. Right down to the tattoo on the chest of the man who’d shot them all.
“I don’t know why he didn’t kill me,” Sam whispered. “Maybe he thought I’d bleed out. Like those kids with Tommy.” He gritted his teeth, and I saw now how deeply hearing about Tommy had affected him. It had likely been what triggered his nightmare.
“Whatever the reason,” he said now, “It was unfair. I should have died that day too.”
Sam didn’t know how he got to the hospital in the city. Maybe the clerk in the store. Someone told him later he may have been airlifted. But he didn’t remember any of it.
Sam had the surgery without anyone knowing who he was. After that, he’d had the unlucky fortune of picking up an infection, where he almost died again, since he was still recovering from the surgery.
“It was a month before I could speak properly. I told them my sister’s name. Said she was in Singapore. Then she was there.”
Sam reached his hand into his pocket, pulling something out I couldn’t see. “I was messed up for a long time Ellie.”
“That’s why you started therapy.” I understood now why he might not have unpacked some of his childhood stuff yet with his therapist. He had more recent trauma to deal with.
He nodded. “I couldn’t get over that idea that it didn’t make sense that I got to live.
My friends—even with the little they had, they had more promising lives than I did.
They could have had a life together.” He opened his hand, showing me the thing he’d pulled out of his pocket.
It was a tiny little Troll doll. A child’s trinket.
It’s what he’d had in his hand that first day we met, before he knew I’d spotted him. The thing he sometimes held in his hand in his pocket.
“The last thing I remember was Ulli’s eyes on me, this in his hand, next to mine. He held onto this thing because Mirabelle gave it to him. This stupid little thing.” His eyes met mine. “He never told her he loved her.”
My chest squeezed painfully for these people I never knew. But it also ached for the pain Sam had been carrying around with him this whole time.
“I’m so sorry, Sam,” I whispered.
He squeezed the little doll. Then he set it down on the coffee table.
“I couldn’t find any family of Mirabelle’s.
But I reached out to Ulli’s in Germany. Told them I knew him, and he’d died protecting the woman he loved.
” Sam swallowed. “I also found out James had been killed. I got obsessed, for a while, with trying to find him, and then there he was in this tiny little article, his tattoo peeking out from his shirt.” He looked at me, his eyes hollow like they had been when we first met.
“Dr. Hassan asked me how it made me feel, knowing he was gone.”
When he didn’t say anything, I said, “How do you feel?”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel happy. I feel like I wish he’d had someone taking care of him so he hadn’t ever done those monstrous things. Same with whoever else he was involved with. It just feels so fucking pointless.”
I rested my hand on his arm.
“Sam,” I said after a few minutes, “you said their lives were promising. But yours is promising too. I’m glad you’re here. I know my boys are too.”
Sam’s eyes met mine. They were full again. And they were wet.
An aching warmth spread behind my sternum, like a rare rose had finally received enough sun to bloom.
Outside, a soft wind blew, rustling the leaves on the tree there.
Sam had kept it open after I’d gone downstairs.
I could feel that breeze now, kissing my face.
It blew through me, sending petals fluttering.
Sam laughed softly, like he was embarrassed he was crying. If it were me, I’d be a snotty mess.
He looked up at the ceiling. “I have to tell you something, Ellie.”
“Anything.”
“Last year, when I first got back home, I was in a really bad place. My thoughts were dark, most of the time. I was staying in that room in my parents’ basement.
I could hardly eat. I slept most of the day.
” He swallowed, looking at the doll on the table.
Then his eyes shifted to me. “There was something that could sometimes bring me out of it though, for these brief little moments. You know, like, when a cloud moves and the sun finally shines again.” He scratched his eyebrow with his thumb.
“I told my therapist about it and he said I should hold that memory close. Use it as my reminder that life could still be good.”
My heart skipped in my chest. “What was it?” I whispered.
Sam’s hand dropped to his chest. He met my eyes. “It was you, Ellie. Remembering you.”
My heart flipped with a loud thud I was pretty sure echoed across the room. Especially since I’d ceased breathing.
“That weekend we spent together,” Sam continued, “It was perfect to me. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, so I held it up like this shining, golden thing; a piece of joy safe in my heart. It saved me, Ellie. You saved me. So… thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I whispered.
He took my hand, pressing it to his chest. “Yes you did. You gave me the privilege of being with you.”
I laughed, though I wasn’t smiling. I was crying.
“Rude awakening you got now,” I whispered. “Kids and work and—”
But Sam was shaking his head. “Ellie, that’s the thing.
I still feel it now. But it’s a thousand times brighter.
Every time you smile at me, I remember there’s good in this world.
And when I look at our son—” he cut himself off, audibly swallowing, like he was trying to control his emotions.
“I can hardly breathe, he's so perfect. You and Henry, and Tommy too…Whenever I’m with your family, it feels like whatever’s up there is reminding me that life can be so brutal.
But that it can be so rich, too. So full and made with this indescribable kind of love.
Like sometimes we get to see Heaven right here on earth. ”
My heart was pounding now, thumping around like a caged animal in my chest.
Sam looked down, like he was worried he’d said too much. “I’m better now. So much better. And I don’t expect anything from you. I just wanted to tell you that you saved me, Ellie. Just by being in my life. You still do, every day.”
He laughed then, this embarrassed, self-deprecating sound. “Dr. Hassan told me I should probably be careful how much of that I told you.”
He was still looking down, away from me. But he seemed to register his lower half then. “Shit.” He brought his hands to his buckle, which was still open.
But that’s when I saw that his hands were trembling.
It had taken so much for him to tell me that.
And what he’d said did scare me. Sam putting me on a pedestal meant there was only one way for me to go after this.
But more than that—at least right now—I was honored he’d trusted me.
I knew what it was like to pour yourself out to someone and have them trample, uncaring, through the puddle that was left of your heart.
I set my hands over his, stopping him from what he was doing.
He froze, for a moment not moving. Not even his gaze. Then he drew his eyes up to mine.
Despite downplaying what he’d just said, his eyes told the truth. They were intense. Desperate. Raw.
I could have said so many things. But I didn’t want to speak.
I wanted to show him. So I set his hands on his stomach, out of my way.
I folded his jeans down again, pushing the clothing aside to expose the bullet mark: that symbol of pain I wanted to keep him from living in.
I bent down and kissed it, my lips brushing feather-soft over the angry pink scar tissue.
Sam was frozen, completely unmoving. For a moment I worried I’d scared him.
But when I pressed my hand to his hip, my thumb landed on his pulse there. It was beating fast.
He was perfectly still, his eyes on me. I brushed his skin with my thumb, the pale part next to the scar.
I skated my fingers across his exposed skin, along the part just above the elastic band of his shorts.
His eyes closed briefly, like he was trying to contain himself.
But I saw the way he stirred in the place still covered.
The place just below where the strip of soft hair that ran from his navel disappeared.
I pulled the other side of his jeans down, still leaving that part of him covered. His skin here was an expanse of possibility. It was his, and now, just for now, it was mine.
I kissed him on the other side, too. But this time, I kept my eyes on his. As my lips brushed against him, closer and closer to the place I could feel him growing, Sam’s pupils blew wide.
“Ellie,” he husked.
I gave him a final kiss. Then, I stood up. “Come with me,” I whispered. Without looking back, and with my heart pounding, I walked down the hall in the direction of my room.