But then honesty tugs at my conscience, and I have to admit that my reservations are nothing more than my own fear of getting hurt again. Hurt as I have only been hurt once in my life. By Sam.
A car rolls into the driveway. I pop up from my chair and go to the front door. Sam and Kat are back. She’s in the front seat, smiling and then laughing at something Sam has said. I watch them, amazed at how natural it seems to see them together, and how only a week ago I could not have imagined opening our lives to him in even the smallest way.
But that is exactly what I’m doing. I feel the pull of it from a force far stronger than I will ever be. Resistance is my flight response. But my heart is directing differently. I just don’t know if I’m strong enough to listen.
Sam gets Kat’s wheelchair out of the back and she sits down in it. He rolls her to the house.
“Mama!” Kat calls out.
Only then do I step away from the window and open the front door. “Should I even ask what you two have been up to?”
Kat laughs and says, “It was so great!”
I smile at her exuberance and then look at Sam, noticing now that his face is pinched, as if he’s in pain. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, brightening a little. “Just a headache.”
“Can I get you something? I have some—”
“Thanks, but I have something at the house. I should be going.” He backs up and steps out into the grass. “You’re a good partner, Kat,” he says.
“You too,” she throws back.
“Okay. I’ll see you then.”
He strides across the grass and gets in the car, but not before I see the look on his face, and a new worry sets up inside me.
~
KAT IS IN GOOD spirits the rest of the afternoon. When I ask her what they had done, she says, “Can it be a secret just a while longer?”
“Was it anything dangerous?” I ask, hearing how silly I sound.
“Mama. Of course not.”
“Okay, then,” I concede.
And she’s all smiles again.
We hang around the house the rest of the day, doing normal things: I work on the website I’ve been setting up for the marina, Kat reads a book that is part of her homeschool curriculum. And all the while I can’t quit thinking about Sam. About the look on his face just before he left this afternoon.
After dinner, I ask Kat if she would mind if Myrtle came over for a bit. She looks at me, clearly curious, but says, “Nope.”
I call Myrtle and ask her if she can stay with Kat for a couple of hours, and to my surprise, she doesn’t ask me where I’m going. But then I suspect she knows and is probably doing a high-five on the other end of the phone.
I take a quick shower and change into jeans and a pink V-neck T-shirt. I blow dry my hair, spritz on my favorite perfume and concede to a little lipstick.
When I walk into the living room, Myrtle has arrived. She and Kat both glance up from the checkerboard they are playing on and look at me, wide-eyed.
“My goodness,” Myrtle says.
“You look pretty, Mama,” Kat adds.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Are you going to see Sam?” she asks in a voice that makes it clear she already knows the answer.
Myrtle smiles and says, “Goin’ to see somebody important.”
“Don’t make something of it that it’s not,” I chastise them both.
“We’re just goin’ by the clues,” Myrtle says, giving me a once-over. “And you do look pretty.”
I kiss Kat and leave the house with warm cheeks, embarrassed by my own transparency.
Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.
~ Paul Tournier
Gabby
The drive to Sam’s doesn’t seem nearly long enough. I pull into his driveway with my stomach in knots. I should have called first. I can’t just show up out of the blue. But I am worried about him, and I tell myself that’s the only reason I’m here. Well, the main one, anyway.
I knock at the back door and then wait a minute before rapping again. His car is in the drive so he must be here.
I start to knock again when the door opens, and Sam stands before me, his eyes groggy.
“Hi,” I say, awkward now and wondering what in the world I had been thinking to just show up like this.
“Hey.” He runs a hand through his hair, looking self-conscious.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I took something. It makes me kind of out of it.”
“Migraine?” I ask.
He nods once, and says, “Come in.”
“You’re probably better off going back to sleep,” I say.
“I’d rather not,” he says, and I can hear in his voice that he’s glad I’m here.
I walk in the door, and then follow him to the kitchen. He flips on the light and blinks once, rubbing his eyes.
“Have you had dinner?” I ask.
“No. I’ve actually been asleep since I got back from your place.”
I’m a little surprised, but cover it up with, “Can I make you something?”
“You don’t have to do that, Gabby.”
“I’d like to,” I say. “I’m not as good a cook as my daughter or Myrtle, but it will be edible.”
“That would be great. Do you mind if I take a quick shower?”
“No,” I answer quickly, “go ahead.”
“Be back in a few minutes. Make yourself at home.”
“Okay.” I watch him disappear and listen while he walks upstairs. I remember his old room and the times we had made out there when his parents were out of the house. We had been so young, learning about love together, neither of us more experienced than the other. My lips tingle in remembrance of the first time Sam ever kissed me, and I touch my fingers to them, then blink away the memory and check the refrigerator for something to cook.
Eggs, a Vidalia onion and some feta cheese. That should do. I pull out a frying pan and put everything together for an omelette. I throw a couple pieces of bread in the toaster on the countertop, and the kitchen is soon filled with the smell of cooking.
Sam is back just as I finish up the omelet and slide it onto a plate.
“Wow. That looks so good,” he says.
“Thanks.” I put the plate on the table, and he sits down.
“Are you eating too?” he asks.
“I had dinner earlier,” I say. “You go ahead.”
He digs in with enthusiasm, and I feel suddenly glad to be here. Why, I can’t exactly put my finger on. I just know it feels right for now.
When he finishes, I put my hand on his arm. “May I ask you something?”
His face becomes instantly guarded, but he nods.
“Is everything okay with you, Sam?” I ask, and there’s worry in my voice.
Something in his eyes goes soft. “I’m all right,” he says.
I hold his gaze for a moment, looking for something more, even though I’m not sure what. Relief spills through me, and I can’t explain my concern. Maybe it’s simply that what has happened in the past week is beyond my own imaginings — that Sam would ever come back here — that anything of what we once felt for each other might actually still exist.
But sitting here next to him, I am unable to resist this fluttering of desire and hope entwined inside me. And so I believe him. What reason do I have not to?
Life is a sum of all your choices.
~ Albert Camus
Sam
It feels utterly strange at first, sitting in the kitchen of my childhood with Gabby, both of us adults with a long stretch of years we’ve lived with little to no knowledge of each other.
I eat the food she has prepared, each bite tasting better than the previous one, and I wonder about the man who had been her husband, what kind of life they had together.
“How long were you married, Gabby?” I ask, the question out before I can think better of it.
She looks up at me
, surprise widening her eyes and then says, “Eight years.”
“Where did you meet?”
“At UVA. My junior year.”
I feel a rush of irrational jealousy for the fact that she had met someone there, the college we planned to attend together. The fact that we hadn’t was my fault and mine alone, and I guess some of this must show on my face because she gets up from the table and puts the frying pan in the sink. She starts to scrub it with a sponge, her back to me, her shoulders stiff.
“What was he like?” I ask, forcing neutrality into the question.
She doesn’t answer for a few moments, and then, “One of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”
Her answer catches me off guard. I’d expected something more typical of divorce, a note of bitterness, at least. But there was none. Only regret. “Oh,” I say. “What—why did you—”
She turns from the sink then and stares directly at me, her arms folded across her chest. “Do you want complete honesty?”
I nod once, not at all certain that I do.
“He wasn’t you, Sam,” she says, her voice raspy. “That was his only fault. No one ever has been you.”
The pain in her expression is like a blade in my stomach, and I slide back my chair, stand with my arms aching from the need to pull her to me. I don’t give myself time to think about it. I go to her and reel her in.
She is unyielding at first, her body rigid against me. I press my lips to the top of her hair, then my cheek to her forehead. She instantly goes soft, a sound of submission breaking from her lips.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” And I’m not even sure what I’m apologizing for. One thing. Or a thousand things.
I hold her face in my hands, and we stare at each other for a string of seconds. In her eyes, I read all the pain she’s felt over what I did, and something inside me collapses with grief and sorrow. “Gabby—”
But she stops me before I can finish, pulling my face to hers and pressing her lips to mine. The kiss is at once shocking in its unexpectedness, and yet so utterly familiar. We’re both tentative at first, testing, tasting, and then I deepen the kiss, and it’s exactly as I remembered, sweet and right in the way of something lost and again found.
I think that I could kiss her for the rest of my life, just like this, and nothing more. I run my hands down her long hair; anchor them at the small of her back. She drops her head and makes a sound that I remember, one of longing, of surrender.
We come apart as if in a dreamlike trance, pulling back to look at each other with something like disbelief, as if neither of us can believe we’re really here. That this is really happening. “I’ve had this exact dream so many times,” I say, brushing the back of my hand across her cheek. “But every time, I woke up to realize that’s all it was. That’s all it would ever be.”
“And that was your choice,” she says, and her voice has anger at the edges. “It didn’t have to be like that, Sam. I loved you.”
“I loved you,” I say.
She pulls away and crosses the room in an obvious need to put distance between us. “How can I believe that?” she asks, anchoring a hand on the countertop, her knuckles whitening.
I want to tell her everything. I need to tell her. My hesitation is not for fear that she will hate me more once I do, but that I will hurt her more in doing so. And yet, I know I have to.
I sit down at the table again and ask her to do the same.
She does so reluctantly, pulling her chair back so that we’re farther apart, like she needs that space to be objective.
“I never meant for any of it to happen,” I say, and already I’m wincing at the lameness of my start. She waits for me to go on, her expression now blank. “I missed you so much, Gabby, I actually thought I might die from it.”
A flicker of emotion crosses her face, and I can see that it’s what she felt, too.
“One night, I went out with some guys I met at my school. They’d been trying to get me to go with them for weeks, and I never wanted to. I don’t really know why I went that night, except that you and I had talked the day before, and I could hear the distance growing between us, like our lives were being filled up with other things and other people to the point that pretty soon, there wouldn’t be room for each other. Or at least that’s what it felt like then.”
“And that’s the night you met her?” she asks, the question breaking a little at the end.
“We’d gone out drinking at this place where girls from a nearby private school hung out. I had way more than I should have, and by the time she and I started dancing, I was nearly stumbling drunk. I don’t even know how we ended up back at her room. And I don’t remember having sex with her.”
Gabby slides her chair back and stands, a sound coming from her throat, as if someone has knocked the breath from her. “I don’t think I want to hear anymore,” she says.
“There’s no excuse for what I did, Gabby,” I say. “And I’m not trying to make one. I just want you to know the whole truth.”
“That you had sex with another girl!” she cries then, “when you were still telling me how much you loved me?”
“And that was true.”
“So what? You fell in love with her after one night together? One night when we’d planned to spend the rest of our lives together?”
I look down at my hands, then force the words up from where they’ve been buried inside me. “I never fell in love with her.”
“You married her!”
“She was pregnant.”
Gabby’s gaze snaps to my face, shock widening her eyes. “From that one night?” And then shaking her head, “That certainly sounded stupid.”
“I didn’t know until a couple of months later. I didn’t see her again after that night until the day she came to tell me.”
She turns to the sink, bracing one hand on either side and dropping her head forward. I push back my chair and cross the floor to place a hand on her back. She whirls around as if my touch has burned her.
“What is it that you want me to take from this, Sam?” The question is ragged and torn from her, like tape from a wound.
“I just want you to know that I know I messed up in the biggest possible way.”
“That you cheated on me in a one-night stand and got a girl pregnant? What am I supposed to say? Oh, that’s okay. Now I understand everything.”
“I don’t expect you to say anything. I just needed you to know—”
“What? Know what?”
“That I never meant to hurt you. That I screwed up. That hurting you the way I did—I’ve never been more sorry for anything in my life. And if I could—”
“Change it?” she finishes.
I start to say yes, and then I find that I can’t because I see my son’s face and then my daughter’s, and I can’t say something that would deny their existence.
It’s as if she’s read my mind because all the fight goes out of her, like a windsock that has lost the breeze.
“How can we look back from here and question any of it?” she asks.
“I can’t,” I say. “I love my children.”
“And I love my daughter.”
It’s beyond difficult to stand in front of the only woman I’ve ever loved, in the way I think true love was meant to be, and say these things. What I want is to erase every single moment of pain I ever caused her, but I can’t. I will never be able to do that.
She looks at me now, confusion clouding her eyes. “I think I should go,” she says.
“Gabby, please, wait—”
“I did that for longer than you would believe,” she says. “Don’t try to stop me, Sam. I’d like to say I have the ability to resist you. That anything I ever felt for you is just part of the past, but I think you know that’s not true. Please don’t take advantage of that. Just let me go.”
The selfish part of me wants to do exactly that. Take advantage of a moment when vulnerability might trump common sense. But I don’t. I si
mply stand here and watch her walk out of the house, listen as her car starts and then backs out of the drive.
The house is suddenly too quiet.
I’ve never felt this alone.
A true friend is one soul in two bodies.
~ Aristotle
Gabby
I have no idea where to go or what to do. I just know I can’t go home right now.
I call Myrtle and ask if she can stay a while longer. She says of course she can, and she must hear something of what I’m feeling in my voice because she doesn’t even tease me about what I’m likely to be doing staying out so late.
I drive without any destination in mind, taking turns simply because they are there, until I suddenly find myself on the road to Annie’s house.
The driveway to the Winston farm is long and winding, rutted in spots and lined with four-board fencing on either side. In the dark, my headlights glance off the shadows of cows grazing in the pastures.
The old brick house sits at the end of the drive. It was built in the late 1800s. I’ve always loved it, as much for its quaint southern welcome as for the large, loving family that lives here. It’s Annie through and through, big Sunday get-togethers, summer cookouts and a vegetable garden big enough to feed her entire neighborhood through the winter.
My best friend since elementary school, Annie has the life I’d once imagined I would have with Sam. She’d married Scott Winston, a boy she met in high school around the same time I met Sam. They have five children, who all look exactly like a blend of them both, tow-headed like Scott, green-eyed like Annie.
It’s nearly eleven now, and I know Scott, who sleeps farmer’s hours, has long been in bed. Annie’s a night owl like me, and I won’t be waking her up.
Just as I turn off the engine, the door opens, and she steps out on the front porch, squinting and then waving as she recognizes my car. She tiptoes out in doggie-emblazoned pajamas and bare feet, stopping at my lowered window.
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