Will waved the remote without breaking his gaze from the flickering lights. “Have fun. Don’t get arrested.”
Sara giggled again as Sam led her back to the front door. He was careful to match his steps to hers, careful to keep some distance between them. He had let himself get too close too quickly. He reminded himself that she wasn’t going to be there in the morning. He still didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Sara detoured into the bathroom to grab her bag and her sunglasses, and then, at the door, she paused, one hand on the doorknob, one hand on his arm.
“Sam?” she said, and he felt that lift in his chest again at the sound of his name. “Thanks.”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, not daring to look at her hand on his arm but acutely aware of it all the same.
She smiled and slipped out the door into the hallway.
He grabbed his bag from the hook by the door and slung it across his chest, like it was a shield that could protect him, before following her out.
Chapter 27
Sara
“Are you sure we’re on the right subway?” I asked. I found the different colors and numbers and letters for the trains confusing and was glad Sam was still my guide; I wondered how long it had taken him to master the intertwining transportation system.
“We are, if you still want to go to Times Square.” Sam and I sat facing each other along the row of seats that lined the wall of the train, our feet propped up on the middle seat between us, our toes and our knees almost touching.
A handful of people were scattered in seats throughout the train, but most everyone else was listening to music or reading or sleeping. The bright fluorescent lights that ran down the center of the ceiling cast a brightness over us that felt harsh and artificial.
“I don’t mind going to Times Square,” I said, absently folding and unfolding the frames of my sunglasses.
“You mind seeing your dad.” Sam spun his subway metro card between his fingers.
“I mind having to
check in
with my dad,” I clarified. “I told him on the phone I was okay. It’s like he only believes me when he wants to.”
“Maybe he needs to see it to believe it,” Sam said with a shrug and a smile. “He’s your dad; he’ll always worry about you.”
I grimaced. “He said that on the phone too.”
“How’d his deal go? Did he say?”
“Yeah, it’s all good. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”
“You don’t sound that happy about it.”
I flipped my sunglasses over in my hands, staring down at my reflection in the curved lenses. “No, I am, it’s just that his business took up so much of his time. It dominated everything. Some days it was all we talked about. When we bothered to talk at all, I mean.”
Sam’s fingers tapped against the side of the seat. “Sounds like, now that it’s gone, you’ll have more time to spend together.”
“That’s just it. Now that it’s gone, what are we going to talk about?” I looked out the darkened window. “What if we don’t have anything left to say? What if all we have is worry and silence and guilt?” I nudged his toe with mine. “It must be nice not to have your parents worry about you all the time.”
“Are you kidding? All my parents do is worry about me.”
“But they let you move to New York and stay with Paul.”
“It was more like they were relieved when I said I wanted to move here and stay with Paul.”
“They didn’t want you at home anymore?” My heart stung at the thought.
“
I
didn’t want to be at home anymore.” Sam looked out the window at the passing black walls of the tunnel. “The worse things got at home, the more attractive the option of sending me away became. It’s why I worked so hard to graduate early. Everything changed after the accident—and not for the better. I had to get out of that life. I had to get away.”
I curled my fingers around my sunglasses, hiding my reflection from sight. “How bad did it get?”
Sam’s hand reached for his throat where the dog tags hung hidden beneath his shirt. “Bad.”
I was quiet for a moment. An automated voice announced the next stop.
“I hadn’t told anyone the truth about that night, you know,” Sam said, still staring out the window. A tiled wall appeared, the street name written in blue blocks and surrounded by green squares. “I wasn’t sure if Todd and Chris remembered what I had done, and there wasn’t exactly a good way to ask. Jeremy was still in the hospital, so . . . anyway, if I brought it up and they
didn’t
remember, then what could I possibly say? And if they
did
remember, then I didn’t want to risk bringing it up and making it worse. Besides, after a month or so, I figured if no one had said anything by then, they weren’t going to.”
“You didn’t tell your parents?”
He met my gaze, hard, and didn’t look away. “Would you?”
I tried to imagine what it would be like to carry around a secret so big and so bad and not be able to tell anyone.
People shuffled in and out of the train. The doors hissed closed, and we continued through the underground.
“I think Todd and Chris remembered something—maybe not everything, but they started avoiding me. They still hung out together, and once Jeremy was out of the hospital, they would go see him, but never with me. I remember I saw them at the mall once, but before I could say anything, I saw them see me, and they ducked into the nearest store so they wouldn’t have to talk to me.”
“Are you sure? Maybe they were—”
“Somehow I doubt they were shopping the sales at the Baby Gap.”
“Oh.” The walls slid by almost silently, the black flickering past like film. I looked down at my hands, picking at my fingernails. “That’s why you wanted to get away. Because it’s easier to be the one to leave instead of being the one left behind.”
Sam didn’t say anything. Then he bumped my foot with his until I looked up at him. His eyes had lost the hard edge they had held and had softened in surprise. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
I cleared my throat, hoping it would also clear my mind. Memories crowded in close: Mom and Dad singing together at my birthday party. Mom twirling, showing off a bright blue dress, her toenails painted to match. The sound of Dad mowing the lawn on a hot summer’s evening. The rumbling of the motor suddenly transformed into the grating sounds of arguing, yelling. I always thought the brittle silence that followed a fight was somehow worse than all the noise.
My thoughts and emotions knocked against each other like rocks and flint. I didn’t know which one would be the spark that would ignite them all, but I could feel the pain coming.
“You know, you never told me about the medallion on your chain,” I said, shoving my glasses into my bag. My fingers closed around my camera and I pulled it out almost on instinct.
The understanding in Sam’s eyes just about undid me. Clearly, he knew a desperate evasion when he saw one. He didn’t call me on it, for which I was profoundly grateful, and instead he pulled the chain free from his shirt, separating out the circular medallion from the oval dog tags.
“It’s St. Christopher,” he said reverently. “It was my grandpa’s. He wore it while he was in the Navy during World War II. He died almost five years ago and left it to me in his will.”
“St. Christopher is supposed to be good luck for travelers, right?”
Sam turned the metal circle over in his fingers before letting it drop to his chest, where it clanged against the dog tags. “Supposed to be.”
I winced. Here I had been trying to avoid emotionally touchy subjects, and I’d blundered headlong back into the worst one possible.
“I think it’s cool that you have something from your grandpa,” I tried, hoping to steer the conversation to safer ground. “What was he like?”
“He was amazing. He loved to hunt and fish and hike in the mountains. He could speak four languages—well, he could
curse
in four languages, at least.” Sam tucked the medallion and the tags under his shirt again. “He was the one who taught me how to trade.”
“He did a good job,” I said.
Sam leaned his head against the window, his reflection only a sliver of a face in the shadows of the subway. His eyes were distant, his expression lost in thought.
The shadow-Sam had darker hair, black holes where the eyes were supposed to be. The strap of his bag was a band of shadow bisecting his chest before tapering off into nothingness.
I carefully and quietly lifted my camera, angling the lens through the narrow space between my knees and his, and pushed the button, grateful that the rumble and clack of the train was loud enough to cover the click.
Checking the back screen, I caught my breath. The image that flashed past me was quiet and honest and strangely intimate. I felt like I really had stolen part of Sam’s soul. And there was a part of me that didn’t want to give it back.
We rode in an unexpectedly comfortable silence for another stop.
After a new group of people had boarded the train, I knocked his knee with mine. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”
I waited until Sam roused himself from his thoughts and settled back against his seat.
“Is there anything you wouldn’t trade away?”
“No,” Sam said instantly. “Everything is on the table. Everything is up for grabs.”
“Really?” I asked in suspicion and in surprise. “There’s nothing you would keep for yourself? What about St. Christopher? You’d trade him?”
“It only has value because I say it does. If something came along that I thought had more value, I’d trade it.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “You’d trade away part of your past, just like that?”
He shrugged. “You’ve got to keep things moving. If leaving behind the past means you can have a better future, then, sure, why not?”
Why not?
I repeated to myself. The answer dropped on me without invitation:
Because when all you have is the past, it’s hard to let it go.
My mom had left when I was eight. I had lived more than half my life without her, but she was still there, present in my mind and my memories. Even today, when I had promised myself I wouldn’t think about her, I couldn’t seem to let her go. Yes, it had been bad—those days and weeks and months before she had left, and the days and weeks and months after she’d left—but before that, there had been some good as well. That was what I wanted to hold on to: the good memories of my past. Even if they sometimes felt more like a dream than reality.
“You know,” I started slowly, wondering if Sam would believe what I was about to say. I wondered if I believed it. “Sometimes it’s okay to hold on to the good things—like your grandpa’s medallion—and not trade everything. Sometimes it’s okay to slow down and be still.”
“Is that why you take pictures?” he asked.
I looked down at the camera where I cradled the captured image of Sam in my hands.
“Because when you take a picture, you can keep it forever?”
I hadn’t ever thought about it like that before, but Sam was right. There was something comforting about knowing that once I had taken a picture, it wasn’t going to change unless
I
changed it. I could keep it or delete it, but whatever I did with it, it was
my
decision. My choice. I was in control.
“So, I have a question for you,” he said.
“Yeah?” My thoughts were filled with an assortment of fractured images, pieces of puzzles that didn’t want to fit together.
“Which one are you?”
“Which one of what?” I asked, confused.
“Were you the one who left, or the one who was left behind?”
I swallowed hard, ignoring the rush of tears that threatened to surface.
The subway slowed and the automated voice announced that the next stop was Times Square. I stood up, my knees wobbling, and reached for the pole in the center of the floor. Adjusting my bag over my shoulder, I stared at the doors, willing them to open faster. I needed fresh air. I needed to be outside, up and away from the dark tunnels and the fake light and the questions that hurt to answer.
When the train slid to a stop, Sam stood up, placing his hand next to mine on the pole. “Sara?”
“I was left behind,” I said, fast and quiet. The words tasted strange, hard-edged and metallic. I doubted I had ever spoken them aloud before. The tears I had struggled to keep at bay spilled over and raced down my cheeks.
The doors split apart, and I bolted from the train.
Chapter 28
Sam
Sam’s bag bounced on his hip as he ran after her. She was quick, darting and dodging through the crowds like a pinball set loose from its track.
He knew how she felt. His own thoughts jumped from point to point, sometimes bouncing past, other times sliding away. The tags beneath his shirt chimed along with the metal rings and undone buckles on his bag. If he hadn’t been so focused on Sara, he might have paused to appreciate the music.
She pounded up the stairs, her camera swinging from the wrist strap.
“Sara!” he called out, but she didn’t stop.
Shoving past a couple walking hand in hand, he took the stairs two at a time. He reached out his hand but only brushed the trailing ends of her hair as she rounded the corner.
“Watch where you’re going!” a voice shouted, but Sam was already gone.
That was his problem, he realized. He never watched where he was
going;
he only paid attention to where he was
right now.
If he had been able to see even a few steps ahead, he would have noticed how quiet Sara had been on the train, how quickly she had grown introspective. Something heavy was weighing on her mind, but he had barged in and demanded to know her soul because that was what he was thinking about
right now.
He was thinking about what he wanted. Not what
she
wanted. Not what she needed.
So much for being observant.
He emerged from the subway station and was immediately assaulted by the sights and sounds of Times Square.
There was a reason why he avoided the area as much as possible. Huge video screens lit up the night sky with a false dawn. Neon lights flickered in staccato accompaniment to the never-ending hum of conversation that filled the square. Cars inched their way through the narrow streets crammed with pedestrians.