What Holds Us Together

by Sandi Ward

“No, Sam.” I’m dying to get up and straighten this out, but I feel nauseous. I can barely keep my eyes open. “Please don’t. Don’t do this again.”

  He opens his eyes wider and leans down to kiss me on the forehead. “It’s already done. Get some rest. You might have a concussion. I have to go.”

  “Go where? You’re going home? But are you okay? Did you see a doctor?”

  “I want you to relax and do whatever the doctors tell you. Make sure Peter is okay. He and I made an agreement. I was driving. He agreed to tell everyone that, because I told him it can’t be you. It just can’t. I love you, and I’m sorry I made you upset. So now I want you to help Peter out if he needs it, okay? Promise you’ll take care of him if he needs some help.”

  I start to cry. The tears just stream out of me. I’m still wearing my stupid red prom dress, and it must be three in the morning. Exhaustion weighs on me like a sack of flour. “I will. I love you, too. I don’t want it like this.”

  He takes my hand, but his expression doesn’t change. Sam is sober now, and I can see his mind is made up. This is what Sam does. It’s how he expresses his love.

  He took credit for Lisa’s graffiti. He said the school walkout and snowball fight were his idea. He returned the money Lisa stole and wouldn’t say who gave it to him.

  And now, this. But even in my exhausted state, I know this is different. The consequences are going to be terrible and irreversible, for both Peter and Sam.

  “Sam,” I try one more time. “Please don’t go anywhere. We can still straighten this out.”

  “Annie,” he sighs, shaking his head. “I already did.” He kisses my cheek; then he’s gone.

  * * *

  Henry McKean is drunk. Clearly. He does not deny it. He fails the sobriety test.

  Henry’s family has been here in Manchester for three generations. He’s a good kid. He played Little League. His mom is a third-grade teacher in town. His dad is a firefighter and town councilman. People shake their heads about Henry. It’s a disappointment, for sure.

  Sam is also cited for driving under the influence. He’s the only one with a police record. The cops have a file on Sam with a list of every time they’ve come to school on his account. Sam also has a father who is sick and a mother who is at the end of her rope. I find out later that Sam’s dad has spoken to the local cops and made an arrangement.

  Sam’s parents get him out of town as fast as they can.

  No Excuse

  ANNIKA

  The room goes quiet when I finish. The kids will get Peter’s side of the story when they read that part of the journal, but for now a quick summary from me is enough.

  Delilah looks puzzled, and her face flushes as if it has been scrubbed raw. Donovan stares down at his feet, his expression blank, and I can’t tell what he’s thinking.

  Danny is irritated, shaking a hand out toward Sam. “Are you kidding me? All these years, you never told me, Sam? You let the WHOLE TOWN think you were drunk driving? You let Dad ship you off early to California? You missed graduation?” Then he turns and points at me. “Do you know what you put my brother through? What you put my whole family through?”

  “Don’t yell at her,” Sam snaps. “It was my idea.”

  I bury my face in my hand. The smoke from the wood fire is starting to make my eyes water. “I’m so sorry to let everyone think Sam was driving. I shouldn’t have let that happen. I have no excuse.”

  “You sure as hell don’t.”

  Sam stands up and pushes Danny’s hand away. “I said, knock it off. It was what I wanted. I gave the police a statement without involving Annika. I didn’t ask for her permission. It was my choice. Don’t blame her.”

  I remember sensations from the hospital: the smell of ammonia and the musty odor of the giant fish tank in the waiting room. The lights overhead, so harsh and bright they cast no shadows. Sounds echoing down the hallway of the hospital: Sam’s mom crying and his dad yelling.

  The light from the woodstove reflects off of Lisa’s face, giving her an orange glow. “I remember the ambulance ride. I thought they were taking me to pump my stomach.”

  Sam looks at her. “Right. Henry was drunk and you were passed out in the back, so the only person who knew that Annika was driving was Peter. And I knew he’d say okay if I covered for her. I knew it. He was in no shape for me to even talk to him. He was drugged up before we got to the ER, and then they started prepping him for emergency surgery. But he listened. And he agreed, which I knew he would. Because he liked you, Annie. I knew he did.” He stops, glancing at the kids.

  “I’m not surprised.” Lisa wraps her big white sweater around her tighter. “This all makes total sense. It sounds exactly like something you would have done, Sam.” She looks at me. “And you. Unbelievable. Mom and Dad were so supportive while you were getting away with murder. They were so preoccupied worrying about you after the crash that they barely noticed when I moved out.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “No, wait. I’m not done. Because here’s the truly crazy part: Peter actually called you. After all that. He called you. He still wanted to be with you. You’re so lucky. You always get everything, don’t you? Everything you want. Including this cottage, the only thing I ever asked Mom and Dad for. As soon as you said you needed it, they said sure, Annika and gave it to you.”

  I don’t know what to say. I can’t believe Lisa has managed to steer the conversation back to herself. Is that why Lisa moved in across the street, to keep a closer eye on this house? I thought she moved here to help me out. But now I wonder about her motives.

  It hits me all over again how hopeless and vulnerable I am without Peter. My stomach feels like an empty pit.

  Peter and I kept the secret of Sam’s sacrifice all this time and never told anyone the truth of it. The worst part is that I can never talk to Peter about it again. We pretended that Sam drove the car, and it became our reality. We knew what people in this small town would think, how they’d gossip and judge. And we were sure how his parents would react if they knew—badly, incapable of understanding or accepting me. We always had this thing hovering over us, a lie we ignored. It was a choice we made to get us through a life marked by challenges because we chose to be together. That was the most important thing.

  I never realized I would lose Peter early, and the silence between us on this one topic would extend forever.

  Sometimes over the years, late at night, I’d relive the moment of the crash in a waking nightmare and roll over to hold Peter tight as he slept. As if I could squeeze him hard enough to make the memory go away. But I could never bring his leg back.

  It doesn’t matter, I’d tell myself. It never mattered. Peter’s hands were unharmed. He could still play piano. His face was fine. He could still impress anyone with his wide smile. It could have been so much worse. He rebounded from losing a leg as only an eighteen-year-old with a strong spirit can, with determination and resilience. It was a serious injury—but it never stopped him from living his life.

  Peter would be the first to tell you that losing his leg didn’t ruin his life. He’d say the only way the accident changed his life was that it brought us together. That’s the way he always told the story.

  Yes, of course there were tears. Difficult days. Pain. Questions. The unfairness of it all. He did cry on my shoulder. Of course, he did. Naturally I comforted him, held his hand, dried his tears, and took him in my arms.

  All of that’s mixed up in how and why I fell in love with him. How could it not be? It’s part of our story. Our story. Peter’s and mine. That part of our story has nothing to do with Sam.

  But I believe Sam would understand my love story with Peter, if I had the chance to tell it to him. And now, I realize, maybe I do want to tell him. Maybe, in some small way, I’d feel better if I did.

  Donovan can’t even look at me. My poor boy tries, but ends up turning his face slightly toward the dark corner of the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam says quietly. “
I wish it had been me. I should’ve been the one to lose my leg. Not Peter. He didn’t deserve it.” He shakes his head. “But I’m glad you married him. I’m glad you both were happy.”

  “We were.”

  Delilah’s wide-set eyes shine as she stares at me, trying to get a handle on this new knowledge. “Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you and Dad tell us?”

  “We wanted to protect you from the truth.”

  “Protect us? But—it obviously didn’t make a difference in the end.”

  I can see frustration in her eyes and my heart clenches. “No, not in the end. But it was something we didn’t talk about. We wanted to forget how it happened.”

  “But you didn’t have to keep it from us. We could’ve handled it. Oh, my God.” Her voice is getting hysterical. “Why in the world did Dad think we shouldn’t know?”

  I glance at Donovan, but he hasn’t said a word.

  “Because he loved me, sweetheart.” I know this must not make sense to the twins right now, but I hope someday they’ll understand. “Sam gave your dad the opportunity to rewrite that part of the story. So he took it. Your dad never wanted our lives to be defined by that accident.”

  Delilah nods. I know she’ll at least try to understand.

  I look to my son. Donovan just sticks his hand out. I know what he wants.

  “Sweetheart. Why don’t you sit down, and—”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t want to hear it. Just give it to me.”

  I hesitate. But when I look up at Donovan, his eyes red with disappointment, I decide I owe this much to him. He’s right. He deserves to know.

  I hand him the journal back.

  The Reading Hour

  LUNA

  Donovan drags himself up the stairs, the journal in his hand, pressed against his abdomen. I hop up a few steps at a time, watching his feet land, heavy and slow. The air gets chilly as we ascend farther from the woodstove.

  Donovan takes a seat on his bed near the window, which is the only light in the room. I leap up and walk over his blue blanket to settle down in his lap and warm him. He allows it, holding the book with two hands over my body.

  He flips through pages. When he finally finds the page he wants, he moves me off his lap with care. Grabbing a ruler from his bedside table, he lays the book down flat on the bed and lines the ruler up in the middle. With a slow motion, he rips a page out of the journal, using the ruler to anchor down the book.

  I glance over at the drawing. A drawing! I now see that the paper in the book is unlined, and Peter not only wrote words in his diary but also sketched pictures. In this one, a young man with a ponytail stands in a suit of armor. In his right hand, at ease at his side, he holds a sword. With his left hand, he reaches out to stroke the nose of a dragon.

  Clearly, the boy in the drawing is supposed to be Donovan. You can see it in the angles of his face.

  Donovan considers the drawing for a long time before leaving to walk down the hall to Delilah’s room. When he returns, I see he has thumbtacks, and he secures the drawing to the wall above his bed. It’s the first thing he has put up on the white walls. Then he returns to the journal, which he places on his lap. I watch his eyes go back and forth as he reads.

  Peter liked to write—and rewrite. Tell stories, and embellish them. See in people what others did not.

  Perhaps Delilah is now wondering if that is a fault of her father that she hadn’t considered before. I could see the confusion in her eyes as she realized Peter never told her the truth.

  But for Donovan, portrayed in this drawing not as a sullen and argumentative son, but rather reimagined as a hero, it may be the thing that saves him.

  Our Love Story

  ANNIKA

  As Donovan reads the journal upstairs, I wonder how much Peter wrote about the first few months of our love story.

  That summer, after Sam left, I was devastated. Both Sam and Peter missed graduation. Peter went from surgery to a hospital stay to rehab, and I passed many weeks numb and in a daze. My concussion gave me headaches and nausea, but I was sure my depressed mood was more due to the circumstances.

  After graduation, Lisa left to work in Vermont for the summer at a bed and breakfast. She’d managed to get into a local community college with the hopes of transferring to UMass one day and would be living with a girl I didn’t know in the fall. It was quiet at home, and I was lonely.

  When Peter called, out of the blue, to tell me he was home from the hospital and to ask if I wouldn’t mind driving him to a few physical therapy sessions because his mom was trying to take over his life, I was surprised and said yes right away. I badly needed a distraction and felt terrible about the accident. Although no one knew I’d been driving, my guilt was crushing. I thought Sam would call or write to me from California, but he never did. So I transferred all of my energy to Peter.

  It was shocking at first to see him in a wheelchair without his leg, but it was also surprising how quickly it just became part of who he was. Peter set up a schedule, and I started driving him to therapy all the time. He bought me lunch at the hospital to thank me. I started to see that while the accident was devastating, Peter was a strong and optimistic person, and I liked that about him. It made things easier for me, and the future started to seem brighter. It didn’t escape my notice that Peter smiled at every cute nurse he came in contact with, and they all gave him a ton of attention. Peter was eighteen and a handsome kid, after all. If he felt fear, he hid it well. If he felt miserable sometimes, he didn’t show it—at least, not in front of his doctors, and not very often in front of me. He had no intention of letting the loss of his leg put a damper on his goal of going to college. He almost seemed to relish the idea of having the chance to overcome this ridiculous obstacle, like it was a new adventure. I’d never met anyone like him before in my life.

  That fall, he lived at home and commuted into the city to attend Boston College. I was at Tufts living in the dorm, but I went home most weekends to visit him. We grew to be friends.

  One afternoon in November, when we were at his house after a doctor’s appointment, he mentioned that his shoulders were sore. He was learning how to use a temporary prosthesis, and it wasn’t easy getting his balance and reconditioning his muscles to do what he needed them to do. So I offered to rub his back.

  “Really?” His face lit up. “Yeah, that would be great.”

  We were sitting on a couch in his living room, the wheelchair he was eager to shed nearby. His parents were busy in the kitchen; then we heard them go out to the backyard to rake, so we were alone. I knelt beside him on the couch and started to massage his neck.

  After a few minutes, Peter took a quick glance at me over his shoulder before taking one of my hands in his and gently kissing the inside of my wrist. I froze.

  It was such a small thing, yet it woke me out of a heavy fog. Although I’d always admired him, and had naturally grown fond of him, I hadn’t considered Peter more than a friend up until that moment. He and I had other priorities all summer, healing ourselves. Peter was focused on recovery and learning to walk again, and I was trying to work through my crippling remorse. And now, with this one gesture, I suddenly felt light. The misery of missing Sam had made it hard for me to take pleasure from anything for months, but that kiss felt electric. I felt a burning in my chest, and took in a sharp breath.

  “Do you still miss Sam?” he asked, and I had to lean forward to hear him. “You haven’t mentioned him lately.”

  He held my arm but did not turn around, waiting for my answer.

  I did still miss Sam, but it was a dull ache now that I hadn’t seen him in so long. I considered for a moment how to respond.

  Sam wasn’t coming back. I hadn’t spoken to him since June. I knew our fight on prom night was truly, at the heart of it, about nothing but our fear of commitment, fear of heartbreak, and fear of losing each other. And yet, that’s exactly what happened. We let our anxieties get the best of us.

  I imagined that
if I became Peter’s girlfriend, he would expect and demand a lot from me. But he’d work hard and give a lot in return. And maybe that was exactly what I needed at the moment. Someone to pull me back into the land of the living.

  “I haven’t heard from Sam at all. I don’t know how to get in touch with him. I don’t have an address or phone number.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” He held my wrist gently, and I looked at the back of his head. His hair looked silky, and I wondered what it would be like to touch it. “I never thought he was right for you, but he turned out to be okay. I admire what he did for you. I’m sorry he had to leave.” Peter turned slightly to glance back at me and meet my gaze, blue eyes flashing up at me. “Well, you know, I’m not that sorry. Because now I get to spend time with you.”

  I felt a fluttering in my stomach. From the way Peter was gently holding my wrist, the soft and vulnerable side up, I knew he wanted to kiss me again.

  I’d always thought that the phrase “steal your heart” was silly, but in that moment, I really felt like Peter was trying to steal my heart away from Sam—carefully, consciously, deliberately. And I also knew he was going to get away with it.

  Sam was gone. I was clinging to a memory, and I needed someone right now. Why not Peter? I desperately wanted him to forgive me, and—looking beyond the accident for a moment—he was kind of wonderful. It hit me like a lightning bolt.

  I did want him to kiss my wrist again. I wanted to see what that felt like. I was curious to see if my heart was open to the idea.

  The truth is, I had noticed the width of Peter’s shoulders and admired his smile. I’d listened to the cadence of his voice and his slight accent—crisp and lyrical at the same time—and felt a surge of joy. The nurses assumed I was his girlfriend, and I never contradicted them because that role was so easy to play. Unlike Sam, who was often a closed door, with Peter you knew where his passion and opinions lay about everything, right away. But when I did think about Peter, about what it might be like to be closer to him, I’d always pushed those thoughts away to focus on the tasks at hand—the appointments, the wheelchair, his bandages, or whatever needed tending to.