I'm Not Sam

by Jack Ketchum

  “I did.”

  “If you wash my hair you’re on.”

  “I love to wash your hair.”

  “You hungry yet?”

  “Not really.”

  “Turn off the stove.”

  She turns the shower on, letting it warm up and I watch her undress. As always she’s businesslike about it but to me she’s a Vegas stripper. At thirty-eight she looks twenty-eight, everything tight, the bones delicate. We’ve both felt sad from time to time that she’s infertile, that we won’t be having any children. Me a bit more than her I think -- I’ve got a brother for what he’s worth and a father and mother while she’s an only and both her parents are dead. So maybe I’m more used to family. But I shudder to think how far south her body might have gone were that not the case. It’s shallow of me I guess but as she is right now, she’s a joy to behold.

  She throws the curtain and steps into the tub into the spray of water and I’m right behind her, watching her nipples pucker, watching her glisten. She turns toward me and shuts her eyes. Her long hair’s plastered to her head. I reach for the Aussie Mega and lather her up.

  She smiles and makes these little mmmmm sounds as my fingers dig in for a good, firm, gentle massage. Little lava-eddies of shampoo roll over her collarbone, over her breasts and down to her navel.

  “I think I could go to sleep like this,” she says.

  “Standing up?”

  “Cows do it.”

  “You are no cow.”

  She smiles and tilts her head back to rinse, straightens up and wipes the water from her eyes. Then looks down at me.

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh, really? Already?”

  “I guess so. Turn around, I’ll do your back.”

  She does. I wash her back, her ass, her breasts, her stomach. She raises her arms and I wash her armpits, her arms, then her back and ass again, into the crack of her ass, into her cunt. She soaps her own hand and reaches down to me.

  She’s got my cock in her hand stroking the shaft and rolling around the glans and my fingers are moving inside her, my other hand clutching her breast and we’re both of us making sounds now. She’s gone baritone.

  I know exactly how to touch her. I know exactly what she likes.

  And god knows she knows me. What she doesn’t know is that my legs are giving out and I’m coming all over her ass.

  “Okay, enough!” I tell her. She gives me this look over her shoulder. “For me I mean.”

  “Thank god,” she says. And she comes too, for the first time that night.

  The second time she comes we’ve already closed my own deal and I’ve got three fingers inside her. There’s debate about whether the g-spot really exists but she’s living proof there’s something there. She likes this hard, not smooth and easy like in the shower so that’s what I’m giving her. She’s starting to buck and groan and I’m grinning down at her like I’m listening to my favorite rock ‘n roll song of all time.

  Then she says those magic words.

  I’mmmm commming!

  I could cry or laugh out loud, this is such fun. I stay with her, ratcheting up the pace, the pad of my thumb buffing her clit, fingers pressing hard, sliding along the warm wet wall of her insides.

  Oh! she says and ohhhh! and holds the moment suspended inside her so I hold too while she trembles all around me and then lets go. I work her a little more, smooth and gentle now and she jerks and spasms. Internal electricity. I know the feeling.

  She laughs. The bawdy laugh. The one reserved just for me.

  “Bastard!”

  “You love it. You know you do.”

  “I know I do.”

  She kisses me the way you kiss your lover when he’s made your day. I kiss her back. She’s made mine.

  While I’m heating up the bourguignon, preheating the broiler for the garlic bread and boiling water for the noodles I ask her to go into the study and have a look at Samantha, see if I’ve got the spatter right. She comes back in a little while.

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” she says. “Studying the photos. Good.”

  We’ve got morgue photos and crime-scene photos pretty much all over the place. In my study, in the bedroom, on the bookshelf in the living room. We have to hide them from the guests.

  I’d made the mistake a few years back before her mother died of leaving a series of full-color shots of a Mexican drug dealer lying by the roadside -- his severed arms and legs piled on top of his chest and his head split open by a machete -- left it on my drafting table when her mom flew in from Boston. One look and her face went white.

  Try explaining to a sixty-five-year-old woman that this was research for what she’d consider a comic book.

  “It’s pretty much perfect,” Sam says, “in a larger-than-life kind of way.”

  That makes me feel good. She’s got it exactly.

  “Right. That’s what we’re after. Realistic and over-the-top, both at once.”

  “I can’t wait to see how you’re going to put her back together.”

  “Neither can I.”

  Dinner’s fine. I don’t burn the garlic bread and the noodles are al dente. We’re lingering over our second glasses of Merlot when I get this look.

  “What?” I ask her.

  She smiles.

  “I was just thinking,” she says.

  Unusual for me to go twice in one night but not unheard of and we’ve had that excellent dinner and the wine. There’s a familiar moment of unease when I glance over her shoulder at the glassed-in hutch and her eight, thirty-year-old Barbie dolls are staring at me, not to mention Teddy Davis, her very first teddy bear, threadbare and crunch-nosed, with these strange, droopy, deeply-cleft buttons for eyes -- buttons that actually resemble slanted squinty eyes -- and this down-turned pouty mouth, so that he looks sort of like Bette Davis on heroin. It’s unnerving.

  But that passes. She sees to that.

  And this time, for me at least, it’s even better.

  I go a lot longer and she’s right there with me all the time. We’re a two-man band. She’s on rhythm and I’m on lead. She’s figure and I‘m ground. We don’t exactly come together but it’s so damn close that I’m still hard inside her when she does.

  We always make love with the light on. We figure the dark is for sissies. So that when I roll away I’m able to see the sheen of sweat down her body from her collarbone to her thighs. Sweat that’s part her and part me.

  And I think, don’t ever let this stop. Don’t ever let us get so old or tired or used to one another that we don’t want this.

  The thought comes to me just as I’m about to nod off to sleep.

  Be careful, brother, what you wish for.

  I wake to a sound I’ve never heard before.

  It’s the middle of the night, it’s pitch black but I’m awake so fast and so completely it’s as though somebody’s slapped me.

  It’s a high thin keening sound and it’s sure not Zoey with her toy. I reach over to Sam’s side of the bed. It’s empty.

  I pull the chain on the bedside lamp and the bedroom suddenly glares at me. That keening sound rises higher and more urgently, as though the light were painful.

  I see her. There she is. On the floor in the corner wedged between the wall and the hutch, facing the wall, her naked back to me, her arms clutching her knees tight to her chest. It’s not cold but she’s trembling. She glances at me fast over her shoulder and then away again but I see that she’s crying.

  That sound is Sam, crying.

  But I’ve heard Sam crying when her mom died and it doesn’t sound anything like that. This doesn’t sound like her at all.

  I’m up and out of bed, going to her, to take her in my arms and...

  “Nooooooo!” she wails. “Noooooooo!”

  It stops me dead but I think, that’s not her. That’s not her voice. All the time knowing that’s impossible.

  “Jesus, Sam…”

  ‘Don’t!”

  And now her left hand is dar
ting through the air over her head like she’s shooing away a sudden flock of birds.

  I reach for her. She sees me out of the corner or her eye.

  “Don’t…touch!”

  To me the voice seems maybe an octave higher than it should be. What the fuck?

  “Don’t touch,” she says, a little calmer this time. Through sniffles. And that’s when it hits me.

  It’s a little-girl voice. Coming from my Sam.

  Under other circumstances I could almost smile at the sound. Sam playing the widdle gurl. But these are not other circumstances. The look in her eyes when she glances at me is not funny.

  Okay, she won’t let me touch her but I need to do something to comfort her. Plus she’s naked. For some weird reason that bothers me. I get up and pull the blanket off the bed. Kill two birds with one stone.

  I go down on my knees behind her and hold the blanket out to her.

  “Sam, here. Let me…”

  She bats at me with both hands, hard and fast, and now she’s crying again.

  “Don’t touch me…you hurt me!”

  “Hurt you? Sam, I’d never…”

  “Not Sam!”

  “What?

  “I’m not Sam!”

  And now I’m way beyond confusion. Now I’m scared. I’ve slid down the rabbit-hole and what’s down there is dark and serious. This is not play-acting or some waking bad dream she’s having. She’s changed, somehow overnight. I don’t know how I know this but I sense it as surely as I sense my own skin. This is not Sam, my Sam, wholly sane and firmly balanced. Capable of tying off an artery as neatly as you’d thread a belt through the loops of your jeans. And now I’m shivering too.

  In some fundamental way she’s changed.

  But damned if I’m simply going to accept it. I put on my best comfort voice. Comfort and reason.

  “Of course you are. You’re Sam. You’re my wife, honey.”

  “Wife?”

  She stares at me a moment, sniffles, wipes some snot from her upper lip, then laughs.

  Actually, she giggles.

  “Not your wife. How can I be your wife? That‘s silly.”

  I wrap the blanket over her shoulders. She lets me. Clutches it close around her.

  “I’m Lily,” she says.

  There are silences that seem to peel away layer upon layer of brain matter, leaving you as stupid as a gallon-a-day drunk.

  “Lily,” I say finally. Or at least I think that’s me.

  She nods.

  I get up off my knees and sit on the bed. Our familiar bed.

  She’s stopped crying. She sniffles but that’s all. I’m still getting these distrustful looks, though. I notice Zoey sitting in the doorway, glancing first at me, then at Sam and then back at me again, like she’s trying to puzzle out the situation as much as I am.

  “Why do you say that? That your name is Lily?”

  “Because it is.”

  I point to Zoey. “Who’s that?”

  “Zoey,” she says.

  “And me?”

  “You’re…” I see tears welling up in her eyes again. “You’re…I don’t know who you are!”

  Then she’s sobbing. Her whole body heaving.

  I can’t bear to see this. I don’t know what to do but I’ve got to do something so I get off the bed and go down to her again and before she can stop me I wrap my arms around her. She tries to wriggle free of me at first but I’m nothing if not tenacious so I hold on and her body’s betraying her anyway -- the sobbing’s got hold of her bad.

  It takes a while but at last she subsides. Her muscles seem to drift slowly from high-wire tense to slack. I’m stroking her head exactly like you would a little girl’s.

  She seems exhausted.

  “Come on. Let’s get you to bed.”

  I lift her carefully to her feet and point her toward the four-poster.

  “No,” she says.

  “No?”

  “No. Not there.”

  I want to ask her why not there but I don’t.

  Maybe I figure it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’m afraid to know the answer.

  “Okay, the couch? That all right?”

  She nods. She turns and I see her staring into the hutch, frowning.

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “You locked up Teddy. I want him. I want my Teddy.”

  Good grief. She wants the goddamn bear.

  “No problem.”

  I throw the latch and open the glass doors, pluck him out from amidst his Barbies and hand him over. She hugs him to her breasts. And I’m about to tell her hang on, I’ll just get some sheets and a blanket and pillow when she’s already stepping out past the cat and down the hall into the living room. She seems to know exactly where she’s going. Zoey follows along behind her.

  I gather up the bedclothes and a pair of light pajamas I know she likes and when I get into the living room she’s already lying down, holding on to Teddy. Zoey’s curled up at her feet.

  “I brought you your pajamas. Can I get you anything? Glass of water?”

  She shakes her head. Lets the blanket fall away and stands and steps first into the pajama bottoms and then slips into the shirt and buttons it up top to bottom. She’s not shy about it. I’m watching her. It’s a woman’s nude body I’m watching her clothe but the movements are wrong somehow, they’re quick and jerky, full of restless energy, without Sam’s smooth flow and glide.

  Where are you, Sam?

  She sits down on the couch. Looks at me. Like she’s studying me, trying to figure me.

  “I could have the water now,” she says.

  “Sure.”

  In the kitchen letting the water run to cold I’m aware of her standing behind me in the doorway. I pour the water, turn off the tap and when I turn around I could almost laugh. She’s standing there straight-legged, with her hands on her hips and head cocked to one side. A kid’s cross-examination pose.

  “Who are you, really?” she says. Then pauses, thinking. “Are you my daddy?”

  Her voice is so very small.

  “I’m…no, Lily. I’m not. I’m not your daddy.”

  There. I’ve said it. I’ve addressed her by the name she wants me to use. Lily.

  “Who then?”

  “Patrick. I’m Patrick.”

  I hand her the water and watch her gulp it down. She hands me back the glass.

  “I’m sleepy, Patrick.”

  “I know. Come on.”

  I fix the bedclothes and fluff the pillow. There’s something I’ve got to know. I tuck my wife in. My wife who thinks she might be my child. I’m sitting beside her on the couch. She’s watching me. Holding Teddy. It takes me a while and she must be wondering what I’m thinking but I finally get up the nerve to ask her.

  “Back in the bedroom. You said I hurt you. How did I hurt you?”

  She shrugs.

  “Come on, Lily. Tell me. How? So I don’t do it again, y’know? How did I hurt you?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Where?”

  She gazes down and slowly pulls away the blanket and sheet over her thighs, and points.

  Points there.

  The first scotch doesn’t help nor the second. No way I can go back to bed. No way I can sleep. So I sit in the dark in our overstuffed chair and watch her, fetal on the couch, her face as innocent as a baby’s.

  I’m wondering what the morning will bring. Is it possible she’ll sleep this off and I’ll have my Sam back again? And where in hell did this come from in the first place? The phrase multiple personality disorder keeps banging around in my head like a soup spoon on a frying pan.

  What’s next? A teenage boy who likes to burn things?

  I know her history. Her childhood was apparently just fine. Nobody abused her. Not as far as I know. There were no traumatic car accidents. When her father died she was twenty. Nobody in her family got murdered. There were the usual middle-class adulteries in the family but nothing that would scar her.
>
  So where does this come from?

  The hour of the wolf arrives and with it that peaceful eerie silence it has, when the night-creatures go to ground just moments before the birds greet the day. The sky out the window slowly brightens. She turns in her sleep. I finish my third scotch. Its magic has eluded me.

  I’ve worked a few things out over the course of the night, though. So that whichever way this goes I know what I’ve got to do. At least initially. I get up and rinse out my glass in the kitchen and get the coffee going. I sit down at the table and at some point realize that I’ve been staring at my hands.

  Are these guilty hands?

  Don’t touch! You hurt me!

  This stings. This aches.

  And then I think, no. That was a woman I was touching. My wife. And she was touching me back. I won’t have the fucking guilt. I won’t permit it. I didn’t hurt her. I knew exactly how to touch her. She came for godsakes. Three times.

  The coffee’s down. The buzzer buzzes, telling me so.

  I stand at the table and there she is in the doorway, yawning, arms stretched out above her.

  This is the moment. Either she’ll want the coffee or she won’t. I can smell it rich and sweet and so can she.

  “Is there juice?” she says.

  There’s a lump in my throat like something won‘t go down. These hands are sweating now. But the thing is to maintain control.

  “’Morning, Lily.”

  “’Morning.” She thinks for a second. “’Morning, Patrick.”

  She shuffles over to the refrigerator, opens it, pulls out the grapefruit juice and then hesitates, puts it back on the shelf and takes out a carton of Newman’s Own All Natural Virgin Lemonade instead. She turns to me.

  “This okay?”

  “Sure,” I tell her.

  Breakfast is coffee for me and raisin bran with milk and a glass of lemonade for her.

  “I’ve got to make a few phone calls,” I tell her. “Why don’t you go play with Teddy for a while, okay?”