Hero?
Proud?
He had to stop. Kristen had said something like that at the school, before the shooting. How much she admired Sam. How Sam was an inspiration. She was really something, Mallory had said. They all had to stop. Sam couldn’t take it again. She couldn’t.
Cade! her mind screamed, as it replayed for her all the new reasons why she wasn’t okay, while her husband said that he was proud, so she’d smile and believe him and try to be okay because that’s what she wanted to be, too. Didn’t she?
Pretending… Mallory’s voice echoed from the in-between place that still owned Sam’s thoughts. Sometimes that’s the most dangerous thing you can do.
“Sam?” Brian kissed her fingers, then her throbbing temple.
“Stop it,” she whispered. She didn’t have the strength to pull away, but she needed to. Far, far away.
His strong hand was soft against her fingers, as if he’d realized the simplest touch might be too much for her. But all she had to do was wake up, and everything would be fine again?
“Sam, sweetheart,” he said. “You and Cade are safe. Nate is going to be okay, too. We’re all going to be fine. We’ll start over again, just like before. All you have to do is—”
“No. Stop it!” She made her eyes open. She pulled her fingers away. “It’s not okay. We’re not safe. I almost watched our son die!”
“Cade’s fine. We’re all fine, Sam.” Her husband’s encouraging smile broke her heart. Because his eyes were full of the doubt he didn’t know she could see each time she really looked at him. “The doctor said you have a concussion, that you’d be confused. Don’t try to talk too much. Don’t worry about anything right now. Let me call the nurses’ station and—”
“No.” She grabbed for him and held on so hard, she thought her head would explode. “Not yet. Don’t call anyone yet.”
She couldn’t handle anyone else. She couldn’t stop feeling it: the hopelessness and the helplessness. She was breaking apart again, just like before. It was awful. And her husband didn’t want to know. She could feel it in him, the desperation for them not to be these people again, devastated with no hope of moving forward, or back, to the lighter, brighter world they wanted so much.
“Please,” she begged him, “talk to me, Brian.”
“About the shooting?” He sat on the edge of her hospital bed, as steady and sure on the outside as always. “We don’t have to do that, not until you’re better. You don’t—”
“I have to talk about it. Don’t you see? About the shooting. About us. About me.”
“Not right now.” He sounded almost angry. Desperate. This wasn’t what they’d agreed to be, this broken thing she could feel them becoming again. She was letting him down. “We don’t have to do all of that right now, Sam.”
“Yes, right now!”
She sounded half crazed. Cade was alive, and so was she, so she should be happy, right? Maybe she was crazy. Because instead of being grateful, she was screaming at her calm, reasonable husband for not freaking out like she was.
Brian never did.
“You weren’t there,” she said. “You didn’t see it…”
A memory of Troy’s angry face gobbled up the fuzziness still protecting her—his gun and his hatred aimed at Cade and Sally and Nate. Another boy was lying there, bleeding. Children were in danger, not safe in a world where people killed and destroyed and ripped lives to pieces without warning, without giving anyone a chance, without—
“I’m going to be sick.” She shoved herself higher on her pillows, feeling all over again the powerlessness of both today and twelve years ago. Everything was surging upward, outward, refusing to remain buried.
Her husband wrapped his arm around her. A plastic tray appeared beneath her chin. She leaned against him, loving him and hating him at the same time, and became violently sick, raw emotion emptying from her, until she could finally ease away and lean back against the pillows.
“Don’t try to talk right now, honey,” he said, his voice once more loving and gentle. “You’re not making any sense. Take your time. We’ll find a way through this together, just like before.”
Just like before.
Everything inside Sam froze.
Just like before…
Pretending, gritting through something you’re not ready to do…
“No,” she croaked, “I can’t.”
“Sam,” her husband said, his patience wearing thin, “you need to calm down. You’ve had a shock. We both have. But we’re going to be—”
“I thought our son was going to die! I am not going to be okay, not even for you. You can’t ask me to do that again…”
Like when she’d tried therapy and medication in New York, and it hadn’t done any good. Like when she’d tried to go back to teaching, and couldn’t walk through the front door of her new school, or take calls from families of her former students or friends or colleagues. Like when they’d moved to this peaceful town and she couldn’t start over like they’d planned, even though they had a beautiful little boy to dote on, or be the happy soccer mom her sons deserved, or even take part in a PTA bake sale without having a two-week-long panic attack leading up to it.
They’d been so certain through all of it that she’d be okay soon. All they had to do was keep believing in each other and having faith in their new life, and they’d make it, no matter how much of what they’d been through had to be shoved deep inside to keep going. Only…
“I can’t handle this,” she heard herself say.
“I know it was horrible.” Her husband’s voice was almost unrecognizable. “But—”
“Not the shooting. Us. I can’t handle us anymore, not this way.” What she was saying, what she was thinking, was terrifying. And it was setting her free. “Going home with you, going back to our life, pretending that I’m a hero, and that I’m not just as messed up as I was in New York, so we can get on with what’s supposed to be making us happy. I love you, Brian, but I can’t do it anymore. Avoiding the truth. Not trusting each other enough to face what’s broken, even if what’s broken is us.”
I know you’re scared, Cade had said. You don’t have to talk about it… I know you and Dad don’t want to.
“Sam…” Brian whispered, sounding betrayed and panicked and so very young and afraid. He stood and backed away from the bed. Her husband looked ready to run. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I want some time by myself,” she blurted out, desperate to take the words back. Only she couldn’t. “It’s the only way, Brian. The only way to save us.”
“Save us?” he demanded, devastated. “From what?”
“From ourselves.” The truth kept tumbling out, no matter how awful. “I need time. So do you. We need to figure things out. We need to deal with ourselves and our sons and what’s happened—apart for a while. Away from everything we’ve thought could fix us. And then…”
“And then what? We’ll be a family again, whenever you decide you’re ready to stop giving up?”
“I’m not giving up,” she promised them both, while haunting memories tempted her to let him help her disappear again from her life and her family and the world that kept refusing to be okay for any of them. “All I know is that if I go home with you before we figure out a different way to handle what we’re both going through, I’ll never make it back this time. We’ll never make it back. Please, Brian, try to understand…”
DAY TWO
Chapter Five
April 8, 2013
Darkness could be shot full with light, Sam reminded herself, each time she walked outside to greet the night, grateful for the freedom and the space and the time to think.
Beneath her feet, the road sparkled with spring rain, moonlight, and the glow of Mimosa Lane street lamps. Her thoughts had been jumbled tonight, like most nights since the shooting. And late hours were still easier, somehow, when she was outside. On her walks up and down the lane, her frayed nerves knitted themselves b
ack together, remixing into something brighter and cleaner—the way her garden at home had once soothed her.
Outdoors still felt free. In this hushed world, while others slept, she was separate but still belonged. Shadows transformed the community she’d retreated from once again into the nonthreatening place that had embraced her and Brian and their boys. The night calmed her compulsion to run. It reminded her why she’d stayed so close, still living on Mimosa Lane, even though she’d moved across the cul-de-sac to Julia and Walter’s house.
It had been three months since Bubba’s death, since Troy had destroyed the peace Chandlerville families had taken for granted for so long, and since she, her son, and Nate Turner had been heralded as heroes for preventing Troy from killing anyone else. Yet Sam was no closer to resolving her issues with Brian than their town was to resolving the chaos that had consumed everything since the shooting.
She hadn’t had a flashback to 9/11 since she’d regained consciousness at the hospital. So that was something. And she was trying her best not to shut down completely every time her thoughts strayed to that day at Chandler. But she couldn’t go home. Not yet. And the more she heard from Julia about what was going on with the rest of their town, the more it seemed that no one else was getting back to normal either.
Troy’s and Bubba’s families had been the focus of the initial media swarm that had invaded their community. Bubba Dickerson’s parents had been besieged by journalists and cameramen determined to chronicle every tear. Troy’s had been hounded out of Chandlerville after his statement to the police confirmed that he’d used his dad’s gun, and that his dad had pushed him to confront Bubba.
Within a week of the shooting, Troy was transferred to a juvenile detention center in Atlanta and placed on suicide watch. His parents relocated to a condo in the city, to be closer to him and to hide behind the security guards and cameras at the building’s front desk. Nate had come home from the hospital after just a few days, with a shoulder wound that had since healed. But his parents’ anger over what had happened might never be assuaged. And they’d been happy to share their grievances with whatever reporters were interested in listening to how Chandler and the school board were to blame for not protecting Nate and the other kids.
And all the while, the spectacle of media attention aimed at sleepy Chandlerville had taken on a life of its own. Atlanta-based CNN had been the first team to arrive at the school the day of the shooting, not long after the first responders. They’d broadcasted nationally from the start. Other networks followed, even though the details had quickly shaken out that Chandler Elementary wasn’t going to be the next Sandy Hook. A single eleven-year-old boy’s death at the hands of another had become a poignant obsession for a few days. But Chandler hadn’t turned out to be enough of a news sensation to rock the country indefinitely, not the way other recent tragedies had.
Bubba’s funeral had been a feeding frenzy for the news outlets, of course, with everyone’s grief and shock documented for an international audience. The coverage had expanded from there to include school faculty—spotlighting Kristen Hemmings and Roy Griffin, Chandler’s principal, and putting the school board and other local leaders on the spot, as reporters asked their questions and focused their editorials on James and Beverly Turner’s demands for reform.
How could child-on-child violence have happened in yet another idealistic, safe suburb? commentators had asked.
Everyday Americans had ranted to neighbors and strangers on blogs and social media. Hadn’t we learned our lesson yet about our nation’s eroding moral compass?
What was the world coming to, politicians had pondered to whomever might throw a vote their way, when parents can’t send their youngest offspring to school with the expectation that they’ll be safe?
Everyone wanted to know why no one at Chandler had recognized the degree of bullying Troy had endured, or how clearly unstable he’d become. And when it was revealed that he’d brought his father’s pistol to school in his backpack, the gun-rights debate had fired into overdrive, pitting personal liberty against the public’s right to feel protected from their neighbor’s lapses in judgment.
And just when broadcasts had begun to sound repetitive, someone’s research assistant had made the connection between Cade and Sam, neither of whom had said the first word to the press, and Sam’s history with 9/11. Followed by more talk about heroism and courage.
Cade, who barely wanted to talk with anyone anymore, definitely didn’t want to hear about heroes when one of his classmates had been killed in front of him and his best friend had been shot. Sam had continued to decline interviews, too, except with the police. Friends and neighbors and local leaders kept weighing in, though, on gun control and school security and parental responsibility, forming polarizing factions that were ripping at the framework of their small town.
Sam had no interest in adding to that kind of carnage. She’d already watched one city rip itself apart over a trauma no amount of assigning blame would fix. And the fears and the memories and the emotional scars she’d be making public if she were to get involved were already threatening her marriage and her children’s happiness. Because she couldn’t be home with their father, who was refusing to accept that he and Sam had anything to work through beyond her calming down and settling back into their normal routine.
Hers was the final story the national media had been interested in telling. By late February and early March Chandlerville had been left to flounder mostly on its own, color commentary and marquee talent migrating to juicier events.
The Dickersons were suing the Wilmingtons, but had pretty much kept to themselves otherwise. The Turners still wanted heads to roll at the school and on the school board, as if firing people would guarantee that something like the shooting would never happen again. They’d rallied a lot of Sam’s and Brian’s friends and neighbors to their cause. Exploratory school board meetings had been held weekly for over a month, during which Roy Griffin kept covering his butt and showing all signs—according to Julia, a member of the school board—of throwing Kristen under the bus, so he could blame her for anything found lacking at Chandler.
Because someone was going to be held accountable. Someone always was. As if all of them wouldn’t feel responsible, in their own ways, for the rest of their lives.
Sam thought about it every night—going back to the shooting in her mind and searching for some way to stop Troy sooner. She thought about Cade and Joshua, worrying over how all of this was affecting them. She’d thought more and more—more than she had in years, the way her New York therapist had once said Sam would have to, if she ever wanted to really get past what had happened there. And more than anything else, she thought about her husband, who was still staying as positive as ever for the boys. But Brian had grown angry and sullen with Sam, after her repeated refusal to move back home. And when he’d kept insisting, she’d stopped speaking with him altogether about anything but their children’s well-being.
She’d initially promised him she’d need only a few days to pull herself together, when she’d asked Julia if she could stay in her and Walter’s spare bedroom. But waking day after day to solitude and thinking, really thinking about all that had happened—precious days of not having to face Brian’s confusion and determination to talk her into coming back—had turned into weeks, and then months.
She still spent as much time as she could at their house, taking care of the boys, cooking breakfast the same as she always had. Except that she left now when Brian came downstairs. After he headed for work, she’d return to do whatever chores she could at the house while it was empty. In the afternoons she helped Cade and Joshua with their homework, until their father came home from work.
Neither of the boys wanted to talk much about either her move across the cul-de-sac or the shooting, Joshua probably because he was so young, and Cade because he was still in shock about the shooting itself. His silence was to be expected, according to the child psychologist she and Brian had cons
ulted, who’d tried to speak with Cade in a few therapy appointments in March.
After Cade had sulked in silence through each one, Dr. Mueller had recommended waiting another month or so before trying again. Cade clearly wasn’t ready to open up. As long as the kids were following a relatively normal schedule, the doctor had reassured Sam and Brian, eating and going to school and not keeping to themselves too much, what Cade and Joshua needed most now was love and time and parents who’d listen when they were finally ready to talk. And Sam and Brian had both assured Dr. Mueller they would be, regardless of their estrangement.
But Sam couldn’t be there for her husband yet. Her reaction to the mere suggestion of returning home still bordered on panic, and she couldn’t explain to him why, not completely. And Brian refused to stop pushing.
How could she stay away and still say she wanted their family? How could she insist she was fighting to save their marriage, while she refused to go back to the way things had been? Why couldn’t she keep believing in a relationship that had always appeared calm and under control on the outside, but one she was beginning to realize had increasingly left her feeling terrified and alone under the surface?
It wasn’t his fault. They’d become this thing they were together, putting a positive face on the fallout from 9/11 and hoping for the best. And if the shooting at Chandler hadn’t happened, maybe they’d have made it. Maybe. But Bubba was dead, and Sam had been there, believing her son was going to die, too. And when she’d woken in the hospital to her husband’s empty assurances, something inside her had snapped. Or maybe it had finally started to heal. But that was crazy, right? She’d thought so at first, the same as Brian.
And she might still be thinking she was being as reckless as her husband did, if it weren’t for the kindred spirit she’d begun to share her night walks with. Someone who was dealing with a lot of the same hushed, under-the-surface things. Someone she’d promised to be there for every night, even if no one else ever knew about it. Especially because she suspected no one else knew.
Three Days on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel) Page 6