22. Sam
CHAPTER 22
SAM
W hen I was a kid, I used to play this game, Asteroids . It was a remake of a remake of a game from the seventies, but from what I could gather, not much had changed. You were this spaceship in a field full of asteroids, and your quest was to blow them up before they could hit you. It was easy at first. The asteroids moved slowly, and their numbers were few. But as you scaled through the levels, they got thicker. And faster. They broke into pieces that flew at your ship. Sometimes, an alien flew by and bombed you. You were surrounded, beset from all sides, and all you could do was shoot wildly and hope.
“Gerhardt’s on the line again,” came a voice on my headset. My secretary. I reached for my landline. Lines one through four were lit up and blinking.
“Which line?”
“Sorry, line one.”
I picked up and Gerhardt let loose like a firehose. Didn’t I know we had an agreement? Didn’t I know we’d had one for years? I wanted to tell him I barely knew who he was — some franchise owner from nowhere, New Hampshire — but I smiled, cleared my throat, and kept my voice smooth.
“Let’s start from the top. What kind of agreement?”
“A handshake agreement. Let me talk to your dad.”
My lip drew back in a snarl. I forced myself to relax. “I’m your contact now. We’ve been over this. Now, what can I?—”
“You can call him right now, is what you can do. Call him and he’ll tell you, I don’t pay for shipping. That’s been the way of it since you were in diapers.”
I pressed my thumbs to my temples, fighting a headache. “Shipping on what? Do you mean on your stock? Because that isn’t?—”
“Diapers! Call your dad!” And with that, he hung up on me. I dropped my head to my desk. My headset pinged again.
“The McAvoy meeting’s run into a snag. Smith’s getting legal in, but they need you down there.”
I closed my eyes. Thought of asteroids. My head pulsed and throbbed. “On my way,” I said, and heaved myself upright. McAvoy, McAvoy, what even was that? The radio network? Or were they suing us? One or the other. I guessed I’d find out.
A fresh volley of space debris hit on my way to the meeting, a call from insurance about someone we’d hired, some star on one of our lifestyle shows. He had problems, apparently, he hadn’t disclosed. The kinds of problems that made him hard to insure. I tapped on my headset.
“Could you get me someone in, uh… El Network casting? We’ve got a problem with our pick for Star Flippers.”
“Star Flippers isn’t El Network. That’s on El Life.”
I stopped mid-stride. El Life? What the fork was El Life?
“That means it’s a web series, so that’s our Toronto shop. They’re closed on weekends, so…”
“Call someone at home.” I flicked off my headset and barged into my meeting, into a whole fresh flurry of fire. I came out what felt like a whole lifetime later to a beep on my headset. Some angry Canuck. I let him chew my ear off for disrupting his weekend, then told him I needed a new star for Flippers. That set him off again, and I cut off the call. I pulled off my headset and massaged my sore ear, and stood for the first time all day in near-silence. The office had cleared out, everyone gone to lunch, only wasn’t it getting a bit late for lunch? It had to be coming on three, three thirty.
I woke my phone to check, and what I saw made no sense. Quarter to nine. Still morning. Still early. But I’d been to six meetings. Met Dad for…
Lunch.
My heart bottomed out. Lunch had been hours ago, which meant it was night. It didn’t look like night, still sunny outside, but these long summer days were tricky that way. Somehow, my whole day had slipped through my fingers, and Lana would be waiting.
“Oh, my God. Lana.”
I dug through my texts, and there she was.
Hey, you okay? Called Belden’s and let them know we’ll be late…
Canceled Belden’s. Ordering in.
This’ll look pretty stupid if you’ve just stood me up, but whatever. I need to know, are you okay?
I ducked into a meeting room and slammed the door, phone ringing already on Lana’s end.
“Pick up… pick up…”
Lana picked up. “Sam.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Today’s just been?—”
“You’re okay? You’re not hurt?”
“Yeah, I’m okay, but?—”
“Good, then. That’s fine.”
“Wait, Lana?”
She didn’t say anything, and I thought she’d hung up. But I could still hear the TV on her end, some comedy with a laugh track. Ha-ha. Ha-ha.
“Listen, I— I have no explanation. No good one, anyway. I set up my schedule so I’d be done by three. Four at the latest, so?—”
“It’s after nine.”
The studio audience erupted in gales of laughter. I wanted to tell Lana to turn it off, but it sounded a lot like she’d turned it up.
“I thought it was earlier. The light in the sky. I’ve been here since four, not that that’s an excuse. But I could still?—”
“Since four? I thought you finished at three.”
“Four in the morning. I’ve been here since then. If I left now, I could be there by, uh…”
“Close to midnight.” Lana sighed, and the TV cut out. “Forget it, okay? It didn’t work out.”
A sudden cold feeling spread through my chest, like I’d gulped down a whole bowl of ice cream at once. It didn’t work out. Did she mean our date, or us?
“I’m tired,” she said. “And I ate too much pizza. So if you’re okay, I—I need to go.”
I groped for the words that would make this right, but I couldn’t find them. They didn’t exist. I’d lost track of time like the damn fool I was, let my chance slip by me, and now it was gone. How could I explain to her how time compressed? How everything felt like it was happening at once, asteroids from in front of me, asteroids on my back, and that alien spaceship dropping its bombs? Nine o’clock felt like three felt like noon felt like five.
“Let me make it up to you.”
“What, for tonight?” Lana made a gusty sound, not quite a laugh. “It’s not just tonight. It’s been this whole month. I’ve barely heard from you. You’re always busy. I kept telling myself, it’ll settle down. He’s just getting used to it. It’ll be like it was. But this is your life now, and I’m…” She drew a shuddering breath. My throat went tight.
“Lana?”
“I need to move on.”
“From us? Are you…?” I couldn’t say it, but I knew it was true. Lana was done with me, and I guessed I deserved it. I’d promised to be there, and I never had, not tonight or most other nights. Just like Dad had before me, I’d chosen work.
“I get it,” I said. “Maybe it’s for the best. We could keep fooling ourselves, drawing it out. But our lives are too different, like you said.”
Lana didn’t say anything, but her breathing went heavy. Had she wanted me to fight for her? To make this hard?
“Maybe one day,” I started.
“I have to go.” For a few moments, she hung on the line — waiting, maybe, for me to save us. Or maybe her eyes were blurred, and she couldn’t see to hang up. But then the line beeped, and she was gone. And we were over, easy as that.
I headed upstairs, back to my office. My big penthouse office that used to be Dad’s. I stood at the window and looked out on Boston, and wasn’t this everything I’d wanted all my life? Wasn’t this what success felt like? How it felt to be happy?
Maybe Lana and Haverford had been like my NASA dream: a dream that belonged to one season of life. A sweet summer dream that died off in fall. I wasn’t going to Jupiter or moving to the island. I was where I was meant to be, doing what I’d worked my whole life for. And Dad was proud of me, so there was that.
“This is enough,” I told my empty office. “This is me standing on top of the world.”
I dropped into Dad’s old chair and buried my face in my hands.