Chapter 6 Samson
I pull my pajamas on in the bathroom. It is the only private space I’ve got. And then I wipe the toothpaste smudges from the faucet because Dad will be in here next.
I leave the room pristine.
Mom says, “Hot cocoa?”
I walk toward her, and Dad passes me, our bodies scraping past each other by my dinette table bed, his body hard and angular, mine stubbornly soft and young for my age.
“Yes, please, Mom.”
She stands at the gas burner, whisking the milk to make it frothy. When I look at the glow of the flame I wonder how much propane is left in the tanks and how we’ll ever refill them out here in the middle of nowhere.
We sit together in front of the spitting fire.
She has no hot drink of her own. We stare into the flames from the comfort of our camp chairs, Dad enclosed in the bathroom behind the door, and all is well.
There is distance. My mother and me and one steaming mug.
Her face outlined in orange. She’s pretty.
Her teeth are all over the place, true, but her face, her cheekbones, her nose, her brown hair.
She looks like she could have been somebody.
“What did you watch at Mr. Turner’s house, Sam? Anything good?”
“Some quiz show.”
“Oh, I miss them. Especially Wheel of Fortune, now that’s a good show. Hard, but not too hard, you know? I miss our television. Don’t tell your father, but I really miss it now the days are short.”
“Me too. But we have the radio, Mom. And books.”
She laughs. “Are you the parent, Samson, or am I?”
I laugh back. “We look out for each other.”
She looks away.
“Was it like this with your mom?”
She smiles and glances at me and then stares into the fire as if looking for an answer. I sip my milky drink and gaze sideways at her and I wait. I wish I knew what she was thinking.
“Your nanna was hilarious, Sam. Mixture of British humor and our kind. Funniest lady I ever met in my life. Funniest person, full stop.”
She touches her necklace. A dented gold thing with a safety chain. I can’t remember if Nanna Ruth bought it for Mom or passed it down to her.
“What would she say?”
She looks at me. “Oh, I don’t know. But she always made me laugh.
We had giggle fits, the pair of us. I always felt we were enough for each other.
But when she died the truth hit me like a bolt of lightning.
We weren’t enough for each other after all.
I wasn’t enough for her. And with her gone she wasn’t enough for me either.
You need more than one person in your life, see.
You need a backup, Sammy. Otherwise it’s all too much of a burden. ”
“I only have you.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. You have your father; he’d die for you, your dad would. He’d take a bullet for you.”
The fire crackles.
I look into the embers.
“I know.”
“There, then.”
I sip from my mug. “He should talk nicer, though,” I whisper. “I feel like hitting him sometimes.”
She rubs her eye. “Well, don’t. Nothing good comes of that. Your dad’s harsh on you because he wants you to grow into a fine man, that’s all.”
“I was talking about how he speaks to you, Mom.”
She looks down and absentmindedly pinches the skin above her knuckle. “I’m all right. Mothers are tougher than we look.”
A noise from the bathroom.
The door slides open.
Steam.
Dad remains inside.
“Enough of this,” she says, patting my knee.
“I’ll tell you one thing. Your father’s mood improves when he’s had the chance to write properly.
An artist like your dad, with his sensibilities, his talent, the way he can find hope in the bleakest of stories, is afforded certain liberties most don’t deserve.
The way he sets prose down on the page, Sammy, we must let him do it.
Some success, an award or a contract, he’ll turn back to how he was, you’ll see. Mark my words.”
Dad approaches with a small towel around his waist. It looks like his musculature has been carved from white igneous stone: every line and muscle picked out by firelight. A figure on a plinth in some faraway city.
“You want the bathroom, either of you, now’s the time. Nine o’clock sharp I want no noise, not a peep.”
“We know, Dad.”
“I don’t want to hear oh, I forgot to wash my face. This is it. You both done?”
We nod.
He looks at her and his face softens. “I’ll be in later. I’ll try to be quiet.” He looks down at me. “Samson, kiss your father.”
I peck him on the right cheek like I’ve done every night before bed since I could understand the instruction.
“Good night, boy. Not a noise now.”
We retreat.
I drag the comforter up to my chin. The dinette table makes a reasonable bed, as it goes.
Wider than my twin bed in the bungalow. I don’t mind it.
I have my own window and some storage and it rarely gets too cold, not like Mom and Dad’s frozen bedroom at the far end.
Dad’s pulled on a sleeveless undershirt and he’s seated at his desk.
I listen for a while. The cadence of his keystrokes on the word processor.
The gaps where I imagine him dreaming up the next metaphor.
Time passes. I hear him remove his shirt.
The sound of his fingertips hitting the keys faster and faster.
The air is warm and my mouth still has the memory of cocoa.
Dad is in his own world now. Mom will be reading a library book in her bed.
Complete silence, just the way Dad needs it.
Not another boat for miles around. Darkness outside save for sporadic flashes of moonlight.
Once I am confident he’s completely engrossed in his own work, I carefully remove my Walkman from its sock and listen to a cassette recording I made from the BBC’s World Service.
Moral Maze. A conversation that took place live in London at BBC studios that I’m now able to listen to for free here on this forgotten stretch of water.
The undeniable magic of that. Dad is oblivious.
The foam pads of my headphones rest against my ears, and at low volume I listen to academics and journalists debate the death penalty.
Discussions of mens rea and actus reus, of the boundary between sanity and insanity, of the irrefutability of new DNA evidence, of the inherent weaknesses of any jury-based system.
I learn more from the BBC and PBS than I do at school.
My whole life feels like a moral maze some days. Holding my tongue, tough love, lesser of two evils, lying in order to help someone, not speaking up when a classmate cheats.
An inescapable maze.
Dad types, my tape ends, and a play starts on the radio.
I fall somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.
Daydreaming about college. Some Elysian institution surrounded by mature deciduous trees and tolerant students sharing ideas.
Princeton, perhaps, or Oxford. But then it morphs into Dartmouth, the American elms, the meandering Connecticut River, and the forested Upper Valley.
I am almost too warm, but I can’t move or I’ll put Dad off his flow.
He’s working well, I can sense it. The typing is frenetic.
He’ll be pleased we moved so far away from the marina.
I dream about friends I am yet to meet. People like me in a faraway city where nobody is aware of my past. New acquaintances who don’t know me from Adam.
I’ll re-create myself. A true rebirth. As I drift deeper into sleep I see myself in a dorm room with posters on the wall.
Thumbtacks twinkling. The door opens. He walks in, a guy my age.
A friend, I guess. He waits. The room is silent.
I don’t say a word. Static in the air. He pulls his sweater over his head and climbs carefully into my bed.
He rests next to me and I don’t move a muscle.
He places his nose into the crook of my neck.
The warmth of his breath on my skin. The unmistakable sound of someone typing up their essay in the next room.
The smell of him. Nobody trying to hurt or limit me.
He breathes in and out, matching my own rhythm, and every second feels like a minute.
“Did I wake you, boy?”
I squint and rub my eyes. His face looms over mine. “What time is it?”
“Almost one o’clock. Did I wake you up?”
I shake my head.
“Hot toddy? A one-off midnight treat. What do you say?”
I frown.
“You want a hot toddy or not, Samson?”
“Hot toddy?”
“Come on. Don’t tell your mother.”
I wrap myself in my comforter and step outside and pee into the flat metallic waters of the canal. There are shadows dancing on the surface, and an owl hoots boldly from the far bank. He has never woken me up in the middle of the night like this.
He pours something into a mug. “That’ll fix you, boy.”
Was I snoring? Has he been staring at me, rage in his eyes? Does he know what I was dreaming about?
He hands me a mug of black coffee, his breath clouding in front of his lips. He has his work coat on and his beanie but he’s still sweating from sitting so close to the fire.
“What’s in it?” I ask.
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Is it coffee?”
“Drop of Jim Beam in that. I opened the bottle I got from the site foreman last Christmas. Like I said, don’t tell your mother. This is between us men.”
He called me a man.
“Thanks, Dad.”
We sit on the well deck of the boat, staring out into the empty night air. I don’t like coffee, but this toddy is good. Not too strong. I am sitting with my dad.
“You can ask me how it was if you like.”
I frown. “How was it?”
“Fair, boy. Not bad.”
I take another sip and the steam rises to dampen my eyelids.
“Word processor’s decent. Managed some fair work. Nice run. You and your mother were good, didn’t hear a noise. And having no other boats around us made all the difference. Felt like my old self.”
My shoulders loosen.
The water is otherworldly at this time of night. The birds and insects are nowhere to be found, replaced by bats and raptors; hoots and the sound of river birch limbs rubbing against one another.
I think back to the dream. How the boy was in bed with me and then later he was a girl. A grown woman. I felt there was space to be myself in that life. I wasn’t preyed upon.
“What were you like when you were fourteen, Dad?”
“What was I like?”
“Yeah.”
“Normal boy. Fourteen was a decent year. Football team, baseball, captain for a while, won trophies for swim meets up at the pool. Butterfly, mostly. Couple of chicks on my tail. Best time of life, right?”
I drain the last of the toddy, conscious I will have to face them again in a few hours.
“Yes, Dad. The best.”