I'm Not Sam

by Jack Ketchum

  “Thanks for what you did at the hospital, Doc.”

  “My pleasure. Hey, they owe me. Good luck with the therapist. And keep me posted, all right? You know I‘m very fond of Sam.”

  “I know. I will.” I thank him and hang up.

  I’m thinking that with or without a therapist, this could take a while.

  Lily’s on the couch, nibbling from a box of raisin bran. Her left arm’s poking out of a paisley scarf. Her sling. Herman the Human Cannonball is about to be launched by the gang over at Sesame Street.

  “Lily, as soon as the show is over I want you to run a tub for your bath, okay? And be sure to wash your hair. You forgot yesterday.”

  “Okay.”

  She doesn’t seem the least distressed so I’m guessing she missed the woody.

  I go back to the phone and speed-dial the coroner’s office.

  “Miriam, hi. It’s Patrick Burke. Listen, I wasn’t being completely truthful when we spoke. In fact I wasn’t telling you the truth at all -- I don’t know why. There’s no flu. Never was. Physically, Sam’s fine. This is…something else…”

  “You mean like a breakdown?”

  “I guess that’s what you’d call it, yes.”

  “God, I’m so sorry, Patrick. Are you all right? I mean…”

  “The two of us are fine, Miriam. Well, we’ll be fine once she gets through all this. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to give her a leave of absence for a while.”

  “Absolutely. You take all the time you need. Your wife works like a soldier. She deserves it. Can I speak with her? Would that be okay, do you think?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s pretty fragile at the moment. Maybe in a week or so.”

  “Is she seeing somebody, getting therapy?”

  “Yes.”

  Two lies inside of twenty minutes. Not bad, Patrick. I give her the therapist’s name just to seal the deal.

  “Good. Well, give Sam my best, will you? From all of us. And if there‘s anything I can do…”

  “I will.”

  And that lie makes three.

  I’m at the drafting table working on Samantha duking it out with The Torque, trying to keep her from going all svelte on me again, when I’m aware that the television’s gone off and there’s water running in the tub. A little while after that I can hear her splashing around in there. She’s left the door open.

  “Lily?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Close the door. And don’t forget to wash your hair!”

  “You do it”

  “What?”

  “You do it. I get soap in my eyes.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “I do too. You do it, Patrick.”

  She’ll be naked in there.

  I tell myself that I’m being silly. That’s my wife in there and I’ve seen her naked thousands of times. Get a grip, Patrick.

  “All right. I’m coming.”

  I finish crosshatching Torque’s ugly mug, get up and walk to the bathroom.

  She’s sitting in soapy water up to her breasts, small peaked islands in the waves. Beneath the water I can see her pubic hair. She hasn’t depilated in a while so it drifts like tiny dark strands of seaweed. Her left thigh is under water but her right leg’s bent so she can get at the toes, which she’s soaping vigorously. It tickles. She giggles. Her thigh gleams.

  There’s a small line of soap like soul patch on her chin so I wipe it off with my finger.

  “You ready?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Duck under.”

  She tilts her head back into the water and comes up sputtering, wiping her eyes. Meanwhile I’ve got the shampoo off the shelf. I pour some into the palm of my hand and smooth it into both hands, kneel beside the tub and work it into her smooth fine hair. She smiles at me.

  “Don’t get it in my eyes, Patrick.”

  “I won’t.”

  And I’m careful not to. But I can’t help thinking of our last real night together, starting with our shower, starting with me shampooing her hair just as I‘m doing now.

  Then telling her 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.

  This is not a good place to go.

  She’s looking up at me with those very innocent eyes.

  I turn on the water behind her. Fiddle with the hot and cold until it’s luke.

  “Okay, rinse. Close your eyes.” I’m trying to keep the thickness out of my voice.

  I cup my hands, collect the fresh tap water and pour. Collect and pour. Over and over again until her hair is clean and shiny. She stands up, raises her arms and smoothes her hair back off her forehead. The gesture is so Sam it floors me for a moment but only for a moment because with her arms raised I can see the dark stubble in her armpits. Three days growth now. Sam shaves every day.

  I wonder if Lily’s noticed.

  While she’s toweling off I go into her room and retrieve yesterday’s tee shirt, socks and panties.

  The panties are stained again, worse than before.

  I’ll have to talk to her.

  “Dad?”

  “Pat? Hey, how are you?

  My father is Daniel Patrick Burke and he and my mother are the only people in the world allowed to call me Pat.

  I don’t phone him nearly enough. But he’s good about it. I think he understands.

  “I’m okay. How about you?”

  “Not bad. Got a little golf in this morning. I’ll never be any good at the damn game but it gets me off my butt now and then. My partner was Bill Crosby. He asked about you, sends his best.”

  Bill always does. Like my father he’s a retired schoolteacher. Only my father taught math in Tulsa while Bill taught history in the Bronx. Bill’s a little rougher around the edges.

  “Tell him I said hi.”

  “I will.”

  There’s a pause on the other end and I hear the flick of a lighter. My father’s Zippo. My dad’s got emphysema. He shouldn’t be smoking at all but he figures half a pack a day will buy him a little more time than two packs would. He’s content to leave it at that for now.

  “How’s the weather been?”

  “You know, sunny Sarasota. Weather’s fine. I just wish the snowbirds would hurry up and go home. You can’t get a parking space anywhere in this damn town. I went to visit your mother yesterday and then decided to grab a bite to eat. I had to walk five blocks to the Bonefish Grille and then waited half an hour for a table. Sometimes I think everybody down here’s from Minnesota.”

  So here comes the inevitable. The dreaded question. The reason I don’t call too often. But I have to ask.

  “How’s Mom?”

  I hear him pull hard on his Winston.

  “She asked me who I was, Pat.”

  He lets it lie there a moment. On this end, I’m frozen.

  “Sometimes she knows me and sometimes she doesn’t. I wanted to take her out for some ice cream. You know she loves ice cream. They tell me that’s typical. That with Alzheimer’s the sweet tooth goes last. But she gets so confused, you know? She wanted to get a sweater even though I told her she didn’t need one. She couldn’t find her own clothes closet. She went looking in the bathroom.”

  My father knew he needed to put his wife of forty-two years in a managed care facility when she decided to make a frozen pizza for a snack one night and put the pizza in the oven, box and all.

  “Anyhow I got her out of there and we went for a drive and I got her a chocolate sundae. She seemed to enjoy herself, to have a good time. She even reached over and smiled and had some of my banana split, just like a little kid. She was sweet. But, you know, she never once asked about you or your brother. And I’m not sure she knew who I was, even when I kissed her goodbye. Even then she looked puzzled.”

 
; He sighs, coughs. After two years this is still always rough for him. He changes the subject.

  “You hear anything from your brother?”

  “No.”

  And now the pause is on my end. My brother Ed is two years older than me -- he became a D.C. cop after the Marine Corps. He thinks what I do for a living is ridiculous. I think what he does is probably just short of criminal.

  Besides, I’m thinking about Sam.

  “Something wrong, son?”

  “No, Dad. Everything’s fine. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.”

  “How’s Sam?”

  “Sam’s fine. She’s glued to the television.”

  Which is true. I just don’t tell him what show it is.

  “Give her my love, will you”

  “Sure, Dad. Of course I will.”

  Another pause from me. I’m picturing my mother and her chocolate sundae, her reaching across the table.

  “You sure you’re okay, Pat?

  And I almost tell him then. I almost blurt out the entire thing, because I love my father and maybe he can comfort me, maybe he can tell me it’s going to be all right and make me believe him the way I always believed him when I was young and he was the dad, the schoolteacher you could always go to, who always knew that you treated kids the same as you treated adults, with respect and an open heart.

  I want to tell him that I miss her -- that I miss us. Because we’ve always been one hellova pair, Sam and I, not just lovers but the best friends either of us has ever had, who tell one another when we’re hurting or need help and love to crack one another up with some silly goddamn joke. We love the same cat. Respect the same books. Smile to the same Tom Waits CDs in the car. Share a grave distrust of politics, lawyers and Wall Street.

  I want to tell him that I feel abandoned. Like part of me’s living alone.

  But my mother’s burden enough for him.

  “I’m fine, Dad. Honest.”

  I can’t tell if he buys that or not. Finally he breaks another silence.

  “Okay. The two of you come visit your old dad one day soon, all right? It‘s been too long.”

  “Sure, Dad. We will. I promise. Love you.”

  “Love you too, son. Love to Sam. ’Bye.”

  Over the next two weeks I slash away at Samantha. I’ll tame that lovely bitch, keep her juicy ass big if it takes everything I‘ve got. My deadline’s not until the end of next month but when I’m not with Lily I’m obsessive about this. The pages don’t exactly fly -- I keep having to correct them -- but I’ll have it done way before then.

  We’ve fallen into a kind of pattern, Lily and I. She fixes her own cereal in the morning and I make lunch and dinner. I work while she plays. I make sure she has a bath every day and -- over her protests, at first -- that she washes her own damn hair. Once was quite enough for me. I order out for groceries. I do the laundry, skid marks and all. Can’t seem to bring myself to talk to her about that.

  But Lily’s meanwhile become more demanding. Can’t blame her. She’s bored. Television and beads can only go so far. Same for Barbie’s two-story Glam Vacation House, Glam Convertible and Glam Pool and Slide. For a few days she’s into her Easy Bake Oven. She masters Barbie’s Pretty Pink Cake and goes on to Snow Mounds, Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies, S’Mores, and Easy Bake Brownies.

  All a bit sweet for me. But I pretend to like them fine.

  Her Baby Alive Doll likewise exerts its pull. Temporarily. She feeds it, bottles it, listens to its inane prattle and changes its diapers. Teddy seems to be acting as surrogate daddy for a while but I sense his ultimate discouragement. Baby Alive is so screamingly dull.

  The weather’s been fine. She wants to go outside, meet other kids. She wants to go out and play.

  But other kids are out of the question.

  When she asks me why, I tell her that you have to go to school to meet other kids and she‘s not going to school right now. Which puzzles her. But for a while at least she lets it lie.

  Zoey wants to go outside too from time to time I think. Always has. I’ll see her gazing out the window, chattering at the birds, or else she’ll be peering around my legs at the door. But there are critters out there who’d be all too happy to tear her limb from limb. There are critters of the two-legged variety who’d do the same for Sam.

  Re-tard.

  There’s an old rusty swing set and slide left here by the previous owner over by the side of the house. We never use it. But now I set it in order for her. I sand down the rust on the slide, steps, chains and wooden seats and test the chains. I oil the hangers. I have to solder one of the hangers and two links on the chains but other than that it’s in remarkably good shape.

  I buff the slide with SOS pads, hose it down to a shine and test it out myself. I land hard on my ass, which makes Lily laugh. I’ll have to get some sand. She lands gracefully of course on both feet and giggling, on a run.

  Never mind the sand.

  She’s happy to be out. Happy with the swing set in particular. Some days she wants me to push her so I do and it’s a curious feeling. It’s like I’m playing two roles here at the same time, parent or playmate to the kid who shouts higher, higher -- but then in our quieter moments it’s almost romantic, like we’re a new pair of lovers again, doing the kinds of silly kid-things that lovers do.

  I think of Sam and me at the amusement park in Kansas City years ago, before we were married, the way she kissed me from a bobbing horse when I managed to grab that brass ring.

  Then there’s the river.

  She wants to know if it’s okay to go swim in the river.

  There are water moccasins and snapping turtles in there. Snappers are shy usually but water moccasins can be aggressive as hell. They’ll swim right at you. Sam knows enough to look out for them but would Lily? Lily would not. I figure I can be her eyes, though. She wants to swim. It’s hot. We’ve got a dock. Might as well use it.

  I still haven’t gotten around to transferring Sam’s clothes to Lily’s room so I go into her drawer and pick out Sam’s favorite two-piece. Cobalt blue. When last seen wearing it she was making guys stumble into their wives at the bar at the Pelican Grove Palms.

  While she’s putting it on in her bedroom I pack a cooler with a couple of cold Pepsis for her and three Coronas for me and slap together two bologna and cheese sandwiches. I’m not sure I’m all that hungry but I can always feed the crappie with mine when she’s finished swimming.

  “Patrick?”

  I’m wrapping sandwiches. “Uh-huh?”

  “Could you do this?”

  She’s standing with her back to me. She’s got her sandals and bottoms on but the halter’s hanging loose from her shoulders.

  There’s that mole again.

  Did I mention that her back comes complete with the Dimples of Venus? Two deep indents on either side of her backbone down low at her hips. I snap together her halter.

  “There. You ready? Got the towels?”

  “Yup.”

  We make a stop at the tool shed. Against the possibility of water moccasins I select a rake with steel tines. You never know.

  She’s all nervous excited energy. Practically jumping up and down. She runs ahead of me out to the dock and before I’ve even gotten there she’s cannonballed into the silty water. She surfaces smiling and wipes her face and sputters.

  “How’s the water?”

  “It‘s freezing!” Maybe it is, but not enough to stop her.

  The water on the river moves with a slow steady current here but she swims easily back to the dock, turns and swims out a bit further and then back again and holds onto the dock kicking her feet behind her and I realize that it’s Sam’s crawl I’ve been watching. She remembers perfectly how to swim.

  I almost say something but I don’t. Every time I’ve spoken Sam’s name the reaction hasn’t been good.

  So I shut up and watch my wife swim.

  We do this nearly every day when the weather’s good. I’m not about to let her
swim in a storm. I have to explain to her about lightening. I don’t go in myself, I just sit on the dock with my rake and my cooler and watch her and watch for snakes. I was raised around chlorine swimming pools, and natural water -- lakes, rivers, oceans -- just don’t seem right to me.

  I do like to fish, though. And crappie are great eating.

  I dig out the fishing rods and the tackle box. Besides crappie, my favorite, you can pull bass and perch from the river. Catfish, of course, if you‘re bottom fishing. And gar, which look like fucking prehistoric monsters and are vicious on the line. Their bodies are heavily armored and their jaws are filled with long sharp teeth. You catch a gar, you don’t touch the damn thing, you cut away the hook, leave it to him as a souvenir. I’ve seen gar with three or four of them hanging from their jaws like some kind of Goth mouth-jewelry.

  You can use practically anything as bait -- chicken liver, frozen shad, dough balls -- but I prefer nightcrawlers myself. There’s a ravine about a half mile from the house and at night after a heavy rain there are hundreds of pale fat bodies wriggling through the grass trying to keep from drowning. All you need is a flashlight and a jar with a perforated lid and some dirt inside and you’ll have your bait in no time.

  So that’s what we do.

  Sam never liked this part. I mostly did it alone. But Lily’s delighted at discovering this strange living world writhing under our flashlights at her feet. Even more so at finding some of them stuck together. I’m not going to try to explain to her about hermaphroditism.

  She has no problem at all picking one up, examining up-close and then dropping in the jar.

  The problem comes the following day when we start to fish.

  She hates worming the hook. Won’t have any part of it. Hates to watch me doing it too.

  She’s feeling the worm’s pain.

  I always wondered exactly how much pain is really involved in this. It’s not as though a worm has much in the way of a nervous system. But it’s important to push the hook through the flesh of the worm several times so it doesn’t slip off in the water. Usually three will do. But after the first invasion of that flesh the writhing can get pretty intense. As though the worm were angry, indignant at this unwarranted piercing. You can look at the worm and imagine you’re seeing torture up close and personal.