I'm Not Sam

by Jack Ketchum

  It’s 6:46. The date is May 29th.

  It can’t be.

  Yesterday was Friday, May 11th. I worked all day at the Tulsa ME’s office, mostly on a fat drunken Dutchman who’d slammed his car into a tree and a farmer who died of a heart attack in an enormous pile of turkey shit. I came home, and Patrick and I showered and fucked, had leftovers and wine for dinner and then we fucked again. And that last one was pretty wonderful.

  May 11th to May 29th. How the hell can that be? Short of coma, how is that possible? If it were coma I’d have awakened in a hospital, not in my husband‘s bed.

  I’ve lost eighteen days somehow. Two and a half weeks!

  I’m glad I’m sitting down.

  I can hear the buzzer from the Krups machine in the kitchen. The coffee’s ready. But I don’t want the coffee anymore. I feel like anything I put in my stomach would come right back up again. I need to know what’s happened to me.

  Doc Richardson. John. He’d know I think -- if anybody would. He’s been our doctor forever. He qualifies as a friend by now. And I’ve got to tell him about Patrick too.

  It’s much too early to call, but I can try him in an hour or so. Meantime I’ll have that shower. I’ve been sweating. I stink.

  On the way to bathroom I look in on Patrick again. I think he may be dreaming. He hasn’t moved. His mouth is open slightly and his brow is knit and his eyes are restless beneath the lids.

  He’s hiding in sleep. How well he’s hiding isn’t clear.

  The shower feels wonderful. Our water pressure’s fine and I turn it on full blast, standing with my back to the shower-head so that the warm sting of it pounds away at my neck and shoulders and creates a sort of white noise in my head.

  I don’t have to listen to myself think anymore.

  I wash and condition my hair. I soap my armpits and shave away those tufts of fur. I shave my legs carefully so as not to nick the skin. I take my time at both these things and then I just stand there a while in the spray. I’ll deal with my pubic hair some other time -- for now I just wash myself clean, inside and out.

  It’s only when the water begins to chill that I turn it off and towel dry. If I could, I’d stay in there all morning until my skin begins to prune and pucker.

  On any normal day I’d blow-dry my hair, I’d moisturize, but this is not a normal day. Now I do want that coffee. After the shower, I think my stomach can handle it. I slip on my robe and pad out into kitchen.

  The microwave tells me it’s seven-thirty. I’ve been in there almost an hour. I sit at the kitchen table and sip the strong hot coffee, black with two sugars. There’s no cream. He’s not picked any up for me. Patrick takes his black.

  Doc’s an early bird. He’s the kind of old country black-bag doctor you hardly ever see anymore. He opens at eight. So at eight o’clock sharp I’m on the telephone.

  My hands are shaking again. I don’t think it’s the coffee.

  Millie, his receptionist-slash-nurse, picks up right away.

  “Hi, Millie, it’s Sam. Is he in yet?

  There’s a strange hesitant pause on the other end.

  “Sam? Why, it’s so good to hear from you, dear. I’ll put you right through.”

  Then it’s Doc on the line. He sounds surprised and happy.

  “Sam! Damn, girl, you had us worried!”

  And hearing his voice I can’t keep the sudden tears out of my own. Rational Samantha Burke is having a complete and total meltdown on the telephone.

  “John, what’s…I don’t understand…what’s happening here…I don’t…I’ve…somehow I’ve lost days, weeks, I don’t remember…and Patrick won’t…he’s…he just…our living room’s destroyed, and my wedding dress…John? Who’s Lily?”

  There’s a silence.

  “Sam, Lily’s you.” he says.

  And that’s how I learn that for eighteen days, I’ve been a little girl.

  He asks me to calm down and try to begin at the beginning so I tell him about waking up and Patrick’s strange, scary reaction and his sleeping and the trashed living room and the children’s toys and all the rest and I try to go slow but it’s hard, I know I’m skipping over things, but he listens patiently without interrupting and then he tells me about Patrick bringing me to his office and his interview with me and the subsequent results of the MRI, which were negative. He tells me that Lily appeared to be a smart, polite child of about five or six years old. He tells me that apparently I’d suffered from selective memory loss and age regression -- he avoids the phrase split personality -- that I knew my cat Zoey, for instance, but not my husband.

  “I gave him the name of a psychoanalyst to call, Sam. I wanted you to see her right away. For some reason Patrick wanted to try to bring you back himself. I guess he did.”

  “Will I…good god, John, is this going to happen to me again?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Will you try the therapist?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Good. And from what you’re telling me, so should Patrick. Tell him to give you her name and number. I’d see Patrick myself today but I’ve got a meeting in Oklahoma City at ten o’clock and I’ll be gone all afternoon. I’m really glad you caught me. Can you bring him in tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I’ll see to it.”

  “Okay, nine o’clock. In the meantime, let him rest. He’s had quite a shock. And you might try to get some yourself. Any valium in the house, anything like that?”

  “I think so. I’ll check.”

  “If you need some, call Millie. I’ll leave a prescription for you.”

  “Thanks, John. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Sam. You try to relax now, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I sit down with the dregs of my coffee and think this over. It’s a hell of a lot to take in all at once like this but that’s true of the entire morning. I need Patrick to fill me in on all the rest of it but Doc said to let him rest, so I will. The thing to do, I think, is to get busy.

  I’m going to put our house in order.

  In the bedroom Patrick’s turned away toward the window and Zoey’s curled up in the crook of his arm. I walk over and scratch her neck and the top of her head. She’s purring.

  I hang up the robe and slip on a pair of panties, jeans, a Jimi Hendrix tank top and my running shoes and I’m ready. I close the bedroom door behind me against the noise I’m about to make and haul the Electrolux out of the hall closet and the trash basket out of the kitchen.

  Zoey’s favorite stuffed toy is lying near the baseboard at the entrance to our living room. I pick it up and inspect it for glass. It’s clean. It’s escaped the general devastation.

  Our cat has the strangest relationship to this thing. Every now and then we’ll hear her yowling, this loud sad mournful sound coming out of her, and every single time the toy’s on the floor or the bed or the couch where she’s deposited it right in front of her.

  The toy’s a tuxedo, just like her. Patrick’s theory is that she thinks it’s family -- a dead or lost brother or sister possibly. I tell him that’s morbid. But with that sound she makes, he might be right.

  I toss it out of the way down the hall toward the bedroom and plug in the vacuum. It roars to life.

  For a while after that all I’m really conscious of is my battle against the glass, the tinkling of glass through the metal wand. When I get to Patrick’s framed Incredible Hulk poster, the beer bottle and the painted shade I carefully pick up the larger pieces and put them in the trash basket. The smaller ones fly through the wand.

  Is a wand called a wand because it’s magic? There’s the momentary urge to giggle. I wonder what Lily’s laugh was like.

  I set the coffee table, standing lamp and fireplace screen to rights and shake out my wedding dress. I inspect it for damages. There’s dried blood on the train. There’s a small tear from the end of the zipper down, about an inch long. The blood can be cleaned and the tear repaired but the veil is hopeless, torn to pieces.

 
And that’s when it hits me. I did this. The shattered glass, the overturned furniture, the torn dress.

  I did all of it.

  A little girl inside me. But also me.

  Once I’ve got the place straightened up and I’m satisfied that all the glass is swept away I set to deconstructing what Lily’s done while I was away. The wedding dress goes in the hamper for cleaning and repairs.

  Teddy goes back behind the glass doors in the hutch in our bedroom. Patrick’s still sleeping the sleep of the dead, if not the innocent. In the guestroom -- her room -- I gather up the Barbies, thinking I’ve got to get rid of those swimsuits at some point and dress them in their proper clothes, and put them in the hutch beside Teddy where they belong.

  The boxes for all the toys are in the guest room closet. I’m not surprised to find them there. Patrick’s an inveterate pack-rat.

  For some reason I want that Easy-Bake oven out of my kitchen right away.

  I pull the box out of the pile and in the kitchen, pack the entire ridiculous bright-purple thing away along with all its pans and moulds and boxes. I trek it back to the guest room and shove it deep under the bed.

  That’s when, for the second time, I notice the half-empty glass of milk on the bedside table. A shaft of sunlight through the trees turns the film on the glass opaque.

  I wonder how long it’s been sitting there. Usually a kid will want a glass of milk right before bedtime.

  But last night I slept in our bed with Patrick, not here.

  Connection: and this one hits me like a brick, complete with all its implications, implications I know suddenly that I’ve been avoiding ever since my talk with Doc this morning -- I woke up in his bed, our bed, finally Sam again, with Patrick’s semen sliding out of me.

  I was wrong. He was unfaithful to me. He slept with Lily.

  An image scuttles through my mind like a spider in a web. I’m sitting in a dark movie theatre with my Uncle Bill, who I love beyond all logic for his crooked smile, his deep blue eyes and his curly red hair. I’m ten years old so logic’s not important. Love is.

  Uncle Bill’s come to live with us in the spare room, and much later I find out why. He’s been under my dad’s supervision. My father has vouched for him with the local police, all of whom he knows, and most of whom are friends. Bill is a former postal worker who’s been caught stealing money and checks out of the mail. My father has made a deal to hush it up. It’s either live with Dad or go up on federal charges. Bill has wisely chosen the former.

  But now in that movie theatre -- lunch at Bonvini’s Pizzeria and a day at the Colony Theatre being Bill’s present to me for my tenth birthday -- his hand has come to rest my bare left knee. To this day I can’t recall what the movie was, though I know that I very much wanted to see it at the time, because all I remember is the fear and embarrassment, the humiliation I felt as that hand moved under my skirt, up my leg, over my thigh and between my legs, stroking me.

  About a year ago I performed an autopsy on a nine-year-old girl who had hung herself from a pipe in the basement of their home with her father’s belt. Suicides among children under twelve are rare, but not unheard of. This little girl carried visible signs of vaginal bruising and internal tearing. Her father had been fucking her with both his penis and, as it turned out, a hairbrush.

  Suicide among children is rare, but we all know that child abuse is not.

  I remember my rage that day. It wasn’t at all professional. I managed to hide the fact from my co-workers, but when I came home Patrick got the full brunt of it for what must have been an hour, and he agreed with me that there were people out there who were people in name only, who had only a cosmetic connection to the rest of the human race, who lived their lives without empathy or sense of justice.

  And now I’m angry. Angry at myself for never telling on Uncle Bill all those years ago. Angry at Patrick for betraying me in this strange foreign way, and betraying his words to me that day.

  I feel a slow burn building.

  I know what Patrick’s hiding from. He’s hiding from the fact that last night, he was fucking a child. And he knew it.

  I go to the bedroom. The bed’s empty. Patrick’s gone.

  He’s not in the living room. He’s in the kitchen. He’s pouring himself a cup of coffee. He’s pulled on a pair of boxers and when he hears me behind him he turns around. He looks like hell.

  “What did you do last night, Patrick?”

  He stops mid-pour.

  “I know all about Lily. I talked to Doc. I know everything. So I’m asking you to tell me about it. What did you do?”

  He finishes pouring and slips the mug into the microwave.

  “Do you hear me?”

  He won’t look at me. He presses the keypads on the microwave and it begins its steady wind-tunnel hum.

  “You know what this makes you, don’t you?”

  I almost don’t hear his reply.

  “You’re my wife, Sam,” he says.

  “Yes. But I wasn’t your wife last night, was I? I was some little girl. According to Doc, six or seven years old. So how many times, Patrick? How many times did you fuck me? Did you fuck me every night for eighteen days? Did I put up a struggle or did I just let you?”

  “NO! ONCE! I swear to you, once, only last night! Only last night! Never before that. And that was after days of you walking around half-naked, asking me to help you wash your hair in the bathtub, clip together your bathing suit, and seeing you in that wedding dress again -- I thought it was you for a moment, Sam! I did! And when I called your name, when I tried to touch you, you just went berserk, you screamed at me I’m not Sam, you trashed the room! And then a little later you seemed to forgive me and you were out of the dress, the dress was on the floor, you were naked, and there was glass everywhere, and so I picked you up and carried you…”

  “And you couldn’t help yourself, is that it?”

  There’s no way I can keep the acid out of my voice. I can see he looks exhausted, defeated. To me that reads weak and at that moment I hate him for it.

  “Why didn’t you get me help, Patrick?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted…”

  “You just wanted. You selfish bastard!”

  The microwave timer goes off and to me its routine everyday beep is suddenly as huge as a siren screaming, it angers me by its very normality, when absolutely nothing is normal anymore, and before I know it I’m standing in front of him pounding at his chest and swinging for his face so that he has to fend me off like a boxer and I’m screaming at him, you bully! you baby-fucker! you repulsive son of a bitch! and I realize my claws are out too, I’m going for his face while he’s yelling no no no no! and then suddenly I hear this other sound behind me riding high and stunning over all the sounds we’re making, shutting them down as abruptly as you turn off water from a tap.

  It’s Zoey in the doorway, and her yowling is that familiar yowl we’ve heard so many times before, but there’s more to it now, it’s more complex, a kind of mournful savage screech, as though heartbreak and torment were one and the same, and as I turn to her I see why. She’s got her toy in front of her as always, her tiny counterpart, her tuxedo, but she’s tearing at it now, pulling it apart with claws and teeth and glaring at us as though daring us to stop her.

  A cat can be a terror eye to eye when it seems as though she’s lost control as Zoey is now and a chill rockets up through my spine and I know my feet are immobile as solid stone, that I couldn’t budge them for a billion dollars.

  But Patrick can move his.

  “ZOEY!” he shouts and claps his hands. At the same time he moves on her, stomping hard, each footfall shaking the floorboards, and then for a moment there’s a standoff, Zoey’s eyes burning at him, glittering, and Patrick advancing until she suddenly drops the toy and turns and silently runs away.

  Patrick stoops and picks it up. He cups it in his hand.

  “She’s had this for how many years, now?” he says.

  His voice
is quiet and very sad.

  “We scared her,” I tell him. “We never shout. We drove her mad.”

  He nods. The microwave beeps again.

  This time it’s only a beep, just an ordinary beep from an ordinary machine.

  “Patrick? Give it to me.”

  He places it in my hand. I study it for a moment. I’m studying it but I’m also far away, months and maybe years away. For his part Patrick seems to know that. He’s silent.

  “I can fix this,” I tell him. “I can fix this, Patrick.”

  I can.

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