Authors: Robin Antalek
By default, Sam
became the odd-job man/boy of the neighborhood. Only Mrs. Schwartz with the schnauzer named Colonel asked Sam why he wasn't in school. Sam told her he'd had a little
freak-out, but she didn't seem to buy it. She told him to read the newspaper to keep up with the world, and handed over Colonel's leash.
Frankie Cole's mother paid him to walk her Yorkshire terriers, Spencer and Kate, twice a day. One day when Sam was out with Spencer and Kate he watched as a Realtor spiked a For Sale sign into Peter Chang's front lawn: Peter Chang's mother had decided she'd had enough of winter and was moving to Florida. After that, Spencer and Kate each lifted a leg to the sign on their morning walks and the reliable Kate managed a dump. Sam had to say he felt the same way they did. It was hard to believe Peter Chang's basement would no longer be his.
His friends trickled home from college at the end of their junior year. Peter Chang was first. When Peter came home Sam was in the basement enjoying the many perks that Peter's Japanese video game deal had purchased, among them a flat-screen and multiple game consoles. Mrs. Chang had made him a lunch of Tater Tots and hot dogs like she did when they all were younger, and then sat across from him at the table and made lists of things he could do. As an odd-job man for hire so far he'd emptied the attic and made several trips to Goodwill and one to the dump. Mrs. Chang was not the least bit sentimental. Sam had gone to the basement to get rid of the old TV in the massive stereo cabinet and had gotten distracted.
“Man,” Peter said as he descended into the twilight of the basement, “you need to get a life.”
“Got several,” Sam said as he took out five of his enemies with one fell swoop of the game stick.
Peter sat down beside him and watched. Sam could hear him counting the number of fatalities under his breath. He knew his brain was tracking the level of intensity, the effort, the skill sets.
Peter swayed back and forth with each hit as if he were in the game. Sam, distracted by Peter, was mortally wounded.
“You know what you did?” Peter reached for the game stick and held it in his palm, frowning. “Want me to tell you for the next time?”
“How would that be any challenge?”
Peter shrugged. “It's just a game.”
Sam stood and stretched. “Want to help me haul this thing out? Needs two people.”
“Seriously?” Peter eyed the cabinet. “I think I'm going to get emotional.”
Sam glanced down at Peter and was about to laugh when he saw his friend's crumpled face.
“It's been here forever,” Peter said. “That turntable still works! Shit, remember all those albums we used to play?”
Sam nodded. Mrs. Chang had an odd collection of Broadway show tunes, some comics, notably Lenny Bruce and Phyllis Diller, an album that featured Mr. Ed the talking horse, and a few old ladies warbling love songs. Sometimes, out of boredom or frustration, they'd put on an album and laugh until they cried. Sam looked around the basement, and for just a second, he saw them all there as they used to be.
“You're going to be around this summer, right? So you, me, Frankie, and Johnny, we should go somewhere, rent a house on the water, you know? I have the cash. I have more than enough cash.” Peter licked his lips. “What do you say? You in?”
Sam watched Peter's mouth move, and he heard what he was saying, but all the while he was thinking:
I have to get out of here.
Someone else would walk Spencer, Katie, and Colonel. Peter could help his mother clean the house and move to Florida. Sam's father would order takeout and eat packaged cookies with
or without him. Bella would continue to hurt. Michael would still be in love with Suzie. Sam thought of his mouth pressed against her hand, her tears, and how easily he could have found his way back to her body. He could feel the heat rising, the friction of skin against skin, the effortless tug on a nylon string revealing a milky curve, a tight amber nipple, and the unique smell of that airless basement room, the musty blankets, the brightly colored afghans they kicked to the floor. Sam had been there first. No matter that Michael was there now. Sam had been first.
T
he very first time Michael slept over, Suzie woke to an
empty bed. Right about the time she had belatedly come to the conclusion that Michael had turned out to be a giant shit, he had shuffled into her bedroom wearing only a pair of plaid boxers and carrying two mugs of coffee. He handed her the mug that said Cambridge Bank & Trust and he kept the Horseman for Senate mug. Suzie had inherited the dishware when she rented the apartment.
Michael perched on the edge of the mattress, his thigh touching hers as they sipped their coffees. The way he looked at her then was still new, but it would soon become so familiar. Everything about Michael was close to perfection. The coffee, however, had been weak. He had since learned to make a much better cup.
It was Suzie who brought up to Michael the summer his mother left, the second time they met for coffee in the square. That meeting Suzie had to acknowledge was an actual date, not just a chance encounter.
“You can ask me anything,” Suzie had said, and then waited
while Michael looked puzzled and a bit unsure of what she was offering. “About that summer?” she prodded.
She watched the recognition settle into his face, recognition of a memory that, before Suzie had brought it up all these years later, had been unformed, dormant. Tentatively she admitted to the discovery of the shoebox of photos. Michael nodded, pushed his coffee toward the center of the small table, and listened without speaking. When she got to the part about giving Sam the envelope of photos of their mother, Michael glanced up at her and exhaled.
He played with an empty straw wrapper, wrapping it around his index finger, before he spoke. “When I left for Johns Hopkins she was there; when I came back she was gone. And honestly, it wasn't all that different. My father was quiet, pretty beat up, but he told me they were getting a divorce, he was straightforward, and that was that.” Michael cleared his throat. “Are you saying that your father and my mother?” He swallowed hard. “I knew there were photos. I heard what happened. I wasn't sure what or why, but I didn't know that my motherâ”
“I don't know anything for sure,” Suzie whispered quickly, barely able to get the sentence out fast enough.
Michael nodded slowly. “My father never pointed a finger. But?” He shook his head. “Do the details even matter at his point?”
“I don't know,” Suzie said again. “I was a stupid kid who thought I knew everything.”
“You were not a stupid kid,” Michael said softly. “You were just a kid.”
Suzie was humbled by Michael's generosity. “It was my fault. Everything. If I had just left the photos alone, if I had been less of a snoop, but I never knew what was going on. And I was determined to find out. Either my parents were fighting or my mother
was locked in her room crying. I had to know, but I was just making huge leaps, you know? Connecting the dots where maybe there was no connection?”
Michael reached over and grabbed Suzie's hand on top of the table. He squeezed her fingers gently. At his touch, Suzie hesitated, but then found the courage to forge ahead. “I gave Sam the photos of your mother, but my father also had photos of almost all the other neighborhood mothers. I tossed those photos out the sunroof as we drove away. My father was furious. Here he was driving off into the sunset to start over again.” She thought of the mottled red flush on her father's neck, the angry rope of cords that rose to the surface. Even her brothers, immune to the most heinous parental arguments, had been flattened by their father's fury over what Suzie had done.
“Sam picked them up, you know.”
“What?” After she was done, after the box was empty, Suzie had tossed that as well, and had fallen back into the car, scrunching down into a ball in the backseat as if prepared to deflect a blow. She hadn't had the courage to turn around. Her chest was heaving, adrenaline coursing, too late to take it back. She thought about her mother still left behind in the neighborhood and hoped she wouldn't come out of the house.
“Sam.” Michael nodded. “He picked them all up.”
Suzie shook her head slowly as she considered this. She had no idea why she had never given much thought as to what had happened to the pictures. “How do you know?”
Michael shrugged, as if trying to minimize something painful.
“What happened to them?”
“He destroyed them up at our place on Paradox Lake. We were up there with our dad, right before I graduated from college. I came across Sam building a bonfire. He burned them.”
“Really?” Suzie felt the heat of embarrassment flush her chest and her face.
Michael nodded slowly, but he didn't seem like he was going to divulge the circumstances, and Suzie didn't want to push it. “I didn't know,” she whispered. “I didn't know what I was doing. I just wanted to hurt everyone.” She looked at Michael. If he wanted to get up and walk away from her she would get it. She would hate it, but she would get it.
Michael leaned across the table so their faces were inches apart. She could smell the slight tang of coffee on his breath. “Of course you did, Suze. You were protecting yourself.”
The shock of tears felt hot on Suzie's cheeks. “I hate him so much,” she said. “You have no idea.” She was fumbling for a napkin when Michael pressed one into her palm. She blotted her face and wanted to run away. “I'm sorry.”
“You don't have to be,” Michael said softly. “Suzie, look at me. Come on.” Suzie did as he asked and Michael smiled. For the first time she saw a hint of Sam in there. “We are more than our parents' mistakes. You were fearless, and proud and a little bit reckless. You did what you had to do in the moment. I admire that.” He paused. “I've never had to think about anybody but myself. Well, maybe I should have. But I've only thought of myself. When my mom left I guess I saw that as my chance to remove myself as well. Sam seemed to need our father more, and I suppose I thought my father preferred it that way.”
Suzie had only fond memories of Mr. Turner. He was the dad barbecuing at the neighborhood block party in a red checkered apron, he got in snowball fights with Sam and his friends, and he took everyone to see the new
Star Wars
at the Cineplex in the next town over when no other parent wanted to drive during a storm, piling them all in the station wagon. It was because of
Mr. Turner's inherent niceness that Suzie had hated to find Mrs. Turner among those pictures in her father's collection.
Until now, Michael was the only Turner she didn't really know. When they'd run into each other on Church Street in Cambridge, he had approached her, and it had taken a moment to register that he was from her other life, and that he was Sam Turner's brother. Growing up, their age difference had made any crossover social interactions nearly impossible, so she had only had a few memories of Michael: when he got his license and he drove Sam and Peter to the mall, picking Bella and Suzie up along the way, and when he had posed on his front lawn with a prom date and allowed his mother to take picture after picture, their odd frozen smiles like the bride and groom statues on the wedding cakes in the bakery window.
Suzie had stared at Michael then across the tiny table, before they had even kissed, before they had lain in her bed, a little shy but very much in awe of what they'd done, and she saw a glimpse of what he was offering her. Suzie imagined that one day he might see the foolishness in his decision. But she had been eager to force those thoughts to the back of her mind.
But then they had gone back home together for Bella's mother's funeral and walked into the Spades' house, and the months she and Michael had in Cambridge fell away like false walls. Whatever future they had whispered about, tucked beneath the blankets in Michael's drafty apartment, seemed insubstantial in the face of his family and her friends, and she had panicked. Suzie had made Michael go around the block three times before she had mustered enough courage to walk in the door. Michael had done so without complaining, driving with one hand, the other wedged between her thighs, his thumb rubbing against her tights. Suzie had leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. She had never
thought anything would ever bring her back. But she had come for Bella. Only Bella. No matter that Sam would be there. That Suzie would arrive with Michael. It was all for Bella and nothing more.
Michael had left
a note tucked under Suzie's coffee mug on the counter in their tiny New York kitchen. The stove was just wide enough to roast a chicken, with a dorm-sized refrigerator and a slanted butcher-block counter, and the bed doubled as their couch, but it was their first real place together. Michael had left the apartment around five to make rounds, and Suzie hadn't even heard him get up. She had been studying until three, when she had finally admitted defeat and crawled into bed.
Suzie poured her coffee and squinted at Michael's scrawled
good luck, I love you.
She smiled. The exams and rotations, the lack of sleep, the pressure to get a decent residency, everything was coming at her at once. This year of medical school was taking her down. Instead of feeling ready to tackle the next step she felt defeated on a daily basis by her own overthinking. There were days she was sure her cognitive abilities had rearranged into an approximation of madnessâeven more so when her professors assured her this was all entirely normal. Surely, they saw the contradiction of it all?
Michael, a third-year resident at Mount Sinai, was getting ready to start a fellowship in pediatric cardiology, so he was even busier than she was, and yet he still managed to express himself in the tiniest of gestures. There was the time he had picked up a bundle of bodega flowers and left them in a glass on the bathroom sink, there was the much-improved morning coffee, and he always insisted on carrying the grocery bags and always switched places with her when they walked so she was on the inside of the sidewalk and he was closer to the street.
And in bed he loved her fiercely. From the start she had been overwhelmed by the attention he lavished, and the pleasure he derived as he made her tremble beneath his hands and his mouth. On the nights when their schedules synched and they slept together in the same bed, he had this habit of tucking her head beneath his chin, as if loving Suzie was all he ever wanted. As if all along the secret to everything had been this simple.
Later that night
when the phone rang, Suzie thought it was Bella returning her call. Since Bella had moved to Iowa for grad school, their weekly calls never seemed sufficient. One or the other of them forgot to say something, and it had gotten so bad on Suzie's end that she kept a list of things to tell Bella. She had hoped now that Bella's two years were up, she would be coming back north, but she had fallen in love with a poet named Ted, and they were for the indefinite future blissfully ensconced in a cabin in the woods, writing their hearts out.
Michael was at the hospital, and Suzie, asleep, thought the ringing phone was in her dreams. Slowly she woke, rolled over, and fumbled along the nightstand. “Bells?” she mumbled, her eyes still shut.
“Suzie?” It was her baby brother Joshua, and suddenly Suzie was wide-awake.
“What? What time is it? What's wrong?”
“Uh, it's Mom.”
Suzie sat up. Her chest felt tight. “Go on.”
“She got in an accident tonight. She's in the hospital.”
Suzie was already out of bed looking for something to put on. She grabbed the pants and shirt she had tossed on the chair before bed and began stepping out of her pajama bottoms. “How bad?”
“I don't really know. But the police are here and they won't let me talk to her or see her yet. It's kind of confusing.”
“The police?” Suzie spoke carefully to make sure she heard him correctly. “The police?”
“Yeah, like I said, it's confusing.”
“Is she hurt? Did she hurt someone else?” Suzie knew her mother should probably not be driving, ever, given the amount of vodka that was coursing through her bloodstream on a daily basis. There had been two prior incidents; if this was a third it wouldn't be good.
“They aren't telling me anything.” Joshua sounded exasperated. “I told you.”
“Where's Eli?” Eli was the older of her two brothers by a year, and often the least reliable.
“At a concert.”
“Fuck.” Eli had gone to Cornell to play lacrosse. He had transferred all his intensity to a hard little ball and a netted stick. He did everything to excess, but that seemed to be acceptable on the lacrosse field.
“What? I tried, I can't get him.”
“No, I know. It's just, nothing. You can't get a nurse to tell you anything about Mom?”
“I mean, she's alive and well enough to talk to the police, so I guess she's not that bad?”
Suzie counted to ten and closed her eyes. Josh had been misdiagnosed for years, or just ignored. But finally he had been diagnosed with dyslexia, and he had just finished his sophomore year at a small private college in Vermont that specialized in students with learning issues. He had calmed down a lot. But he smoked too much pot. “What hospital? You know it's going to take me at least three hours to get there, right?”
“I know, Suzie, I'm not stupid.” He paused. “Beth Israel. And you're going to be mad at me.”
“Why?”
“I panicked and I called Dad.”
“Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“But he didn't pick up.”
Suzie exhaled. Her brothers had a relationship with their father that Suzie would never understand. It was like he was their much older brother who paid for everything, who got them good tickets for sporting events and concerts, who never passed judgment on their lives. Josh, the earnest baby of their tattered little family, claimed their father had reformed, that he worked all the time and still loved their mother, that it was their mother who would have nothing to do with him. Suzie doubted the integrity of the story. Since she had left Boston four years ago, she had tried hard to be emotionally as well as physically distanced.