Chapter 8
Eight
brOOKS
Sam’s folder stays open on the desk, taunting me without my ever touching it again.
Maybe if he understands… he’ll want me beside him again.
She thought I didn’t want her beside me.
She thought I didn’t want her.
I pick up the phone and call her again.
Ring after ring. No answer. The voicemail picks up and I grip the edge of the desk as her voice greets me.
“You’ve got Sam. You know what to do.”
If only that were true.
“Sam.” My voice sounds like I’ve been screaming for days. Internally, maybe I have. “Please pick up or call me. I need to talk to you.”
After I hang up, the words I need stick in my mind. Yeah, jackass. Tell her what you need.
Still, I can’t stop myself. I text next.
I found something. I need to talk to you about it. I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry.
After I send it, I realize that can mean anything. I could have found an old invoice. Something she left behind that she may need.
I keep calling, knowing damn well I should stop because she’s not picking up. My messages are going unread. I thumb out of the messaging app and wind up in the photos app. I’d say it was an accident, but nothing’s accidental these days.
There’s a photo memory at the top, my iPhone torturing me as if even it knows I’m a major fuckup.
The photos are all from six years ago. It had been a temperate April day and I’d had one of my better ideas.
A picnic. Me and her. She’d been both amused and charmed, which is exactly what I’d been going for.
In the photos, she’s smiling in a way I haven’t seen her smile in a long time.
Caught off guard, happy, reclining on a picnic blanket and looking at me like not a damned thing was ever going to change.
Two years later, we’d be hurting unimaginably.
Two years after that, I’d push her so far out of my life that she was reduced to writing a list of ways she thought might bring her back to me.
Every morning since she left, I wake up feeling as if I haven’t slept at all. My dreams are filled with reminders of all the ways I’ve messed up everything good in my life.
I find the team later gathered in the warehouse.
The skies are promising nothing remotely interesting enough to give us good footage.
There’s a system building north and west, but nobody feels particularly good about it, which has never stopped feeling weird.
Hoping for chaos seems like a good way to bring on heartache.
What feels wrong about the whole thing is that the machine doesn’t stop. Sam isn’t here, but no one seems to feel her absence as much as I do. Then again, I know they’d have to be hurting immeasurably to even hold a candle to what I’m feeling.
“I’ll take the green beast today since lead’s still out of commission,” Hershel says, coming up beside me with a clipboard. “You can take mine today.”
I turn and blink at him. “What?” Today he’s wearing an AC/DC shirt and looking a little worse for wear than usual.
He sighs. “I’m taking the green beast. Giving you my truck. You know, since your truck is out of commission.”
“Right. Sounds good.”
He makes a notation on his clipboard. I suspect it says, “Brooks is an idiot,” but I have no desire to really find out.
Across the warehouse, Luci’s voice rises.
“…should even have that,” she hisses.
She’s talking to Tony, who answers too low for me to catch. His posture’s screaming irritated. Shoulders tight with his phone clutched in his hand.
“I don’t care,” Luci says. “Just don’t mess it up.”
Tony looks toward me.
Luci’s gaze follows his and her face goes tight.
For a second, that old suspicion stirs. Tony. His phone. How many times has he texted Sam since she’s been gone? Is she answering his texts? His calls? Is he offering her his shoulder to cry on?
“Whatever you’re thinking,” Hershel begins, “I’d wager money that you’re wrong.”
I push away from the wall. “Let’s get going. Nothing’s going to get done if we sit here and keep avoiding the storm.”
And if I have to stand here and think about how wrong everything seems without Sam here, I’ll lose my mind.
If the team hadn’t noticed Sam’s absence before, they do now.
Someone asks where the laminated county grid maps are, and then we all have to spend precious minutes figuring out where they are.
The urge to get mad at someone and tell them that Sam would know exactly where they are is right there, but the only person to snap at would be me.
When we’re trying to figure out which route is best, everyone’s thinking it but no one is saying it: Sam would have had this figured out in five minutes flat.
Well, no one but Hershel.
“She’d probably tell us to do whatever we have to do to avoid the county roads because the rain last night probably washed out anything lying low.”
By 2 p.m., the system starts organizing faster than we expected. People are moving, getting ready to roll.
And all I want to do is drive straight to Sam. I check my phone again as if she might magically decide to call me.
She hasn’t.
A producer sticks his head in and tells me he needs the topography maps. Without thinking I say, “They’re in Sam’s files.”
No one says anything because likely they value their jobs.
I move toward Sam’s desk in the warehouse before anyone has a chance to say anything.
It’s exactly like she left it. Handwritten notes all over the desk.
Her work laptop closed but connected to the charger.
A dirty mug that had likely been left here right before everything went south. More so than it already was.
I open the bottom drawer, the big one where she usually kept her handbag. It irritates me that it’s not in there now, but I know she usually kept maps in the bottom of the drawer.
I curse as I fail to find the maps, instead finding notebooks filled with notes. I pull the top one out, thinking perhaps it may have some sort of organization system tucked inside that may give me a clue as to where the maps are kept.
As I pull the notebook out, something slips from the pages and lands facedown on the floor. At first, all I see is the glossy back of a photograph. There’s a faint processing mark printed along one edge.
I turn the photo over and sit back hard on my heels, feeling like someone has punched the air out of me. The warehouse sounds fade around me until all I can hear is the blood rushing toward my ears.
Our baby. That first ultrasound photo where it looks like nothing and everything all at once.
I remember the day we got this. Sam was lying on the exam table, pretending not to be nervous in that way she always does. But she was gripping my hand hard enough to bruise. I remember joking that if she was gripping my hand this hard now, there’d be nothing left of my hand when she was in labor.
The memory that comes next is one I wish I could scrub from my brain.
“Brooks, you should go east.”
“We’re all right,” I’d said. “We can cut it off up ahead. Won’t even get near us.”
Just like always, she’d been right.
We should have gone east.
The road had gone slick. I squeeze my eyes shut as if that can stop the images of Sam’s hand pressed to her belly, then holding onto the dash. As if I can do anything other than hear the clamp of the brakes. The way the truck had slid sideways before the impact of my shoulder hitting the door.
And then Sam’s awful scream.
She’d told me. I hadn’t listened.
How many times had that exact scenario played out in ways that had destroyed me?
Twice. It had only had to happen twice to take everything away from me.
First our baby. Then her, though at least she was safe in Muncie.
That’s what I kept telling myself. At least she’s alive.
“Brooks?”
I turn, finding Hershel standing in the doorway. Part of me wonders how long he’s been standing there, watching me on the verge of a breakdown. The other part of me just doesn’t care.
I hold up the photo.
“Was looking for the maps.”
His face changes.
“Hell,” he says softly. No old-school rock-and-roll wisdom. I find myself oddly wishing he’d tell me what Ozzy would have done in this moment.
“I was sure she was pulling away from me,” I say, not sure why I’m telling him this other than the fact that it feels like extracting venom from a snake bite. “I thought maybe Tony was giving her something I couldn’t.”
Why I couldn’t give her whatever that was, I still wasn’t sure. Or maybe I was and I was still unable to get rid of that venom.
“I don’t even think she was sleeping with him,” I say, and that gets a noise from Hershel that sounds equally dismissive and surprised.
“The fact you ever entertained that idea makes me question your intelligence, Carlisle.”
“How can I blame her for leaning on someone that was giving her what I couldn’t?”
“First, you can’t, so good thing you’ve realized it,” Hershel says. “Second, I still think you’re reading too much into this. Third, at least you’re coming to the conclusion you’ve been an idiot. As Meat Loaf once said, two out of three ain’t bad.”
I hear someone call my name from outside the office. Sliding the ultrasound photo back into the notebook, I stand. “The producer will be fine without those damned maps.” Right now, someone needs me to be Brooks Carlisle, storm cowboy. The least I can do is pretend I’ve got that much under control.
Everyone’s arguing about the next move when the weather radios all go off at once.
“Brooks,” Hershel says, and immediately, I don’t like the tone.
He jerks his head toward the radar display. The line of storms that seemed to be unable to decide its next move has shifted south.
“Where’s that headed?” Luci asks.
I’m moving because I already know.
Texas Panhandle. Muncie. The Funnel Cloud.
Sam.
I can hear a broadcast on one of the warehouse radios confirming what I already know. Rotation confirmed near town. Damage reports trickling in.
I’ve already got my keys in my hand and I'm heading toward the door when Hershel is beside me.
“I’m driving.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m not that hurt.” Not hurt enough to stop me from getting to Sam, I want to say, but Hershel already knows.
Luci’s behind us. “Brooks, the chase?—”
“I’m going to Muncie.”
“You don’t even know how bad it is yet.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to my wife.”
The chaotic noise of the warehouse has dropped to the point someone could hear a pin drop.
“You can follow,” I say as I move toward the bay doors. “You can run the planned chase without me. You can shut the whole damned stream down and tell the sponsors to call my lawyer. Do what you want.”
My hands shake as I walk toward the truck, pulling the door open with more force than necessary. The wind flings it backward.
Hershel’s already in the passenger seat, rightly assessing that he’s already lost the battle for the steering wheel.
I start the engine and tear out of the yard, ten thousand scenarios, each one worse than the one before it, filling my head.
What if she’s hurt?
What if she’s scared?
I almost laugh at that one. My Sammy Girl? I’ve seen her face monsters head-on with a smile on her face.
What if she’s…
I don’t finish that one.
I pushed her away because I was afraid a storm would take her away from me.
I punished her because I was afraid she’d found comfort in someone else.
And now the only thing I can think of is:
What if I pushed her into the very thing I’d been trying to keep her safe from?