Over the last month she’d begun to share her shadows with a soul far too young and tender to feel as lost as Sam felt. But there he’d been one night—a new light shining into her world, waiting for her on the swings in the community park that was her nocturnal destination. And there he was again tonight, as she left Mimosa Lane behind and stepped onto the crunchy cedar chips that the landscapers spread around the playground equipment.
“What can I do to help you, Nate?” she asked as she took the swing beside Cade’s best friend.
It’s what she always asked, and would always ask, as long as he kept coming back.
She pushed away from the ground, lifting her feet until her swing was airborne, flying, floating, with spring shadows whispering all around. Her companion didn’t respond. He hardly ever did. He’d ask her a question every now and then. How was Cade? Did she go to Bubba’s funeral? Was she mad, because of what Nate’s parents were saying in the press and trying to do to the school? Did she ever think about that day, or about what could have happened?
He never offered anything about himself. She wasn’t even certain he listened to her answers. But she answered all the same, as honestly as she could. They passed the darkest moments of each dawn just like this, when the night was at its most fragile, collapsing in on itself to be reborn into morning.
“You must be anxious about today,” she said. She didn’t expect he wanted his “big day” any more than she had hers three months ago. “Just walking in the door of the school for the bake sale that morning was enough to make me sick.”
She winced as her mind filled with the sound of adults and children screaming. A sleepy little bird in one of the oak branches above them sounded off to the sun that wasn’t quite ready to rise. Nate jumped at the joyous warble. Then he kicked off too, swinging like Sam. He arced back and forth, out of time with her. His beaten-up high-tops dragged the ground with each pass.
“I thought I was ready,” she said, when she usually would have waited longer, hoping to draw him out.
But tonight she was too worried to keep silent. Nate was returning to school later today, for the first time since the shooting, his circumstances wickedly similar to what she’d faced three months ago. She couldn’t know for certain what he was going through. But it was all she’d been able to think about for hours, while she worried for him: Nate and all the other children at Chandler who’d been so in danger that day, and how the memories of it would affect him now, the way hers had attacked the morning of the bake sale.
Startled by what sounded like a jet plane soaring overhead, she looked up, swallowing her panic. She forced her vision to focus on the crystal-clear winter sky above the treetops, just to be certain nothing was there.
“It sounded simple enough to everyone else,” she made herself continue. Nate hadn’t stopped swinging. He hadn’t rushed home the way he had a few other nights. “The bake sale was just another day for the rest of the world. Fun. Easy. Moms love that sort of thing, because we get to be a part of your lives for a while when you spend so much time away from us. It was special. I wanted it to be so special for me and Cade and Joshua. But I was terrified, too. That was another long night just like this one, waiting for the morning to come. I sat right here swinging by myself, not sure if I could make it back home or to the school. I wanted to run away. A part of me still wishes I had, so I wouldn’t have had to be there to see what Troy did to you and Bubba and all the other kids. What he’s done to himself and his family and the people who love him.”
Nate skidded to a halt. The little bird—a cardinal—in a flash of disappearing red, fluttered off. Wind swirled at the brittle leaves left over from the fall, wrapping morning chill around them.
She’d mentioned 9/11 to Nate once before, and how it made things harder for her even now. She’d wanted him to know that maybe she could understand something about what he was feeling. He hadn’t responded in any way before now.
“How…” he said. He inhaled in a gulp, like he was fighting not to cry. “How did you finally forget, so you could go to school that morning the way you did?”
It was halting, personal questions like this that had convinced Sam that Nate had known she’d be coming to the park the first night they’d met. And that maybe he’d planned to find her at the playground, so he could ask the few questions he had.
He was searching for answers, which was a healing thing. Sam hoped so at least. As much as she hoped what she’d been doing each of these nights would help, instead of confusing him even more.
Nate pushed off again, swinging higher.
Her feet snagged on the dust and dirt at their feet.
“You don’t forget it,” she said, knowing it and feeling it and hating it.
He picked up speed, leaning deeper into each swing, pushing harder, probably tuning her out.
Until tonight she hadn’t been certain what he needed to hear, or whether he even knew himself. She understood how that was, feeling safer not knowing. Only how did you get better, when not knowing sooner or later began to make safe feel an awful lot like giving up? And she didn’t want to see this boy make the same mistakes she and Brian had.
Nate wasn’t talking to Cade anymore. She’d heard from Julia that Nate never left his house. Yet James and Beverly were sending him back to school—to the place where the unthinkable had happened to his life—thinking that having a normal day with his friends would help their son move on. The same way Brian still thought Sam’s returning to her normal self at home was the answer.
“You don’t want to forget, Nate,” she said. “Forgetting is the last thing you should do. You have to find a way to live with what you saw and heard that day, and everything it’s making you feel. Even if it keeps things from getting better as fast as you and other people want them to, you have to keep looking back at what you went through. It never gets okay, not completely. And you don’t really want it to. Because thinking something that horrible is okay, or not thinking about it at all, will hurt you. Don’t forget, Nate. No matter what you do or what anyone else says. Don’t try to make yourself forget…”
Brian stood in the shadows of Mimosa Lane’s playground, where his boys had laughed and screamed and played with friends and fought and grown up together, listening to his wife bare her heart to another family’s child.
Sam hadn’t slept well in more than a decade. And now Brian didn’t either. He’d slept less and less every night since the shooting. Since she’d come home from the hospital and moved into their friends’ guest bedroom.
The last few weeks, he’d spent the early hours of each morning haunting the garden Sam had let grow wild since January. And then he’d sit and watch the Davis house through the moonlight, waiting for however long it took for Sam to leave and walk far enough down the lane that he could follow her unnoticed.
In January, he’d convinced himself and tried to convince his boys that Sam would be home before they knew it. Things would be better soon. Mom just needed a few days on her own to calm down. He’d smoothed things over with the kids. He’d gone along with the new routine they’d settled into at the house, with Sam coming and going as she pleased but never staying. He’d kept expecting her to come around, to be waiting for him when he got home from work, ready to talk sensibly about what she was going through and how they could deal with it together, the way they had everything else.
Now, three months later, he was an insomniac who didn’t know how to explain what was going on to himself anymore, let alone to his sons. Oh, and he was stalking his wife. Eavesdropping on the solitude that comforted her in ways she no longer thought he could.
She’d devastated him. She’d left him, without really leaving. She was so close still, it was maddening, but she wouldn’t see reason. She was gone from the house the moment Brian came downstairs in the morning and as soon as he got home from work each afternoon. She’d made him the enemy. She was throwing away every loving, concerned, confusing moment of their lives together, and every supportive thi
ng he’d done.
Brian’s need to help her and to have her close again so his life would make sense the way it used to had only grown. Even when things weren’t perfect before, even when he’d been running himself into the ground trying to make up for the things Sam couldn’t do, he’d had her—the brave woman who’d battled back from so much to stay by his side. She’d been the wife and mother to his boys whom he’d trusted to never give up. She’d been his soul mate.
Now she’d abandoned the life they’d built, to save their marriage, she’d said. And lately, in their neighborhood park in the middle of the night, she’d found a person she was ready to talk to.
He’d watched Sam and Nate for more than a week. He had no way of knowing how long they’d been meeting, hardly talking, hardly visible through the shadows. Sam was clearly still struggling—up at all hours and walking their neighborhood like a phantom. But she was making an effort to face what had happened—with someone else besides Brian.
It was maddening.
It was infuriating.
It was wrong, and he couldn’t take it any longer.
Tasting something bitter and hateful and not himself, he pushed through the shroud of bushes and skeletal pines he’d hidden behind. A twig snapped, outing him before he was ready to own the pettiness, the jealousy pulsing through his veins. Sam whirled toward him in her swing, her feet covered by the fluffy pink bedroom slippers he’d given her for her birthday last year.
Nate shot out of his swing. His eyes locked with Brian’s for an eternal moment, and then he was racing away, sneakers slapping on asphalt, his swing creaking and jerking back and forth, flying haphazardly without him there to anchor it.
“Do his parents have any idea you two are meeting like this?” Brian demanded.
“You tell me.” Sam sounded as calm as every other time they’d talked. But he heard disappointment, too.
It was always there now, in her sweet voice and her eyes and expression, whenever she wanted to talk, but only about what she wanted to talk about: everything she was convinced they’d done wrong since moving to Chandlerville, and why she couldn’t come home and do it all over again. Bottom line, she didn’t believe in him anymore. She didn’t believe in them. All because she was scared, and for the first time in her life she was refusing to face her problems head-on. Which meant she couldn’t face him.
The gentle, open, understanding love she’d just showered on Nate and kept trying to share with Cade the few times she did get him to talk was no longer there for Brian. Not unless he agreed that everything they’d built their Chandlerville life on was absolute crap.
“I’ve been a little too busy at home,” he bit out, “to be chatting up our neighbors about where my wife spends her nights.”
He felt the unwanted explosion rising inside him. But he didn’t let it out. He couldn’t. She was hurting, he reminded himself. He wanted to help her. He had to find some way to get through to her. Things had gotten completely out of hand.
“I understand,” she said, pushing off, swinging back and forth as if she were once more alone, or he was dismissed, or she simply didn’t give a damn what he did next.
Fuck her understanding.
“Come home, Samantha.” He grabbed the swing’s chains and stopped her, moving until he was in her path and looming over her. She wasn’t avoiding him again. Not this time. “This has gone on too long. I’ve tried to be patient, but we have children to raise, and they’re confused. We have a marriage to save, and a community falling apart around us. Don’t you think you’ve been selfish long enough, blaming me for our problems, or whatever else this is?”
He heard himself attacking his wife, instead of comforting her, which made him even more furious. Didn’t she see what she was doing? She was tearing them apart.
She stood, her body brushing his. She slipped away, because he was suddenly too afraid of his own anger to stop her. For now, she went only as far as the curb. But how long would it take before she’d wandered so far, he’d never get her back?
He had less of her, knew less about her—less about himself and who he’d thought he was—by the day.
“I’m not coming home,” she said. “Not until you understand what I’ve been saying.”
“You’re not saying anything.” Nothing that made the least bit of sense to him. “We’re hardly ever in the same room together anymore, because that’s the way you want it. All you seem to want is to give up on getting any better, and to give up on our marriage getting back to what it was, and to tell me it’s all my fault because I want to keep fighting for you. Come home. Then we can talk—about the shooting and Nate and New York and whatever else you need to deal with. That’s the only way we’re going to work this out.”
“I’m trying not to give up on us, Brian.” She sounded so scared, yet stronger somehow than she’d been in a long time. “But I understand what you’re saying about the boys. And I understand how all of this is making you angry. If you think it would be less confusing, I… I talked with Teddy last week about what we’d need to do to make the separation official. Maybe if we did that, we could tell the rest of our friends and the school and the boys and it would be easier for everyone.”
He grabbed her arms so quickly, he didn’t realize he had until he was fighting the urge to shake his wife until she took back the latest bomb she’d exploded in his life. He let her go instead, and watched the same shock he felt at his loss of control bloom across Sam’s moonlit face.
Teddy Rutherford. The aging, graying, good-ol’-boy Southern lawyer who’d handled updating their wills when Joshua was born. Brian’s wife wanted him to talk to their lawyer about filing for an official separation. He shook his head. He tried to laugh. The alien sound that came out left him queasy and made his wife look like she might be sick, too.
“For God’s sake, Sam, we’re going to work this out. We don’t need Rutherford or anyone else nosing into our family business.”
“Anyone else? Like the therapist Mallory recommended we see together?”
Mallory and Pete had been there for both of them through all of this, listening and trying not to take sides the way Julia had. It had taken until last week before the ex–social worker had chewed Sam and Brian out about getting counseling to deal with their issues. But while he and Sam had agreed to counseling for the boys when Cade and Joshua were ready to talk about the shooting, Brian and therapy were a no-go.
Would you consider it? Sam had asked. For us, would you do it, so some of this can really start to get better?
Consider being ambushed all over again with everything that’s gone wrong with you and me and our family? he’d demanded, while he and Mallory and Sam talked on Julia’s front lawn. He hadn’t needed a shrink after 9/11, and he didn’t need one now. All I’ve done is try to help you, the way you said you needed to be helped. We’re fine, he’d insisted. You’re upset, and I totally get that. You should have all the support you need. If you want to see a therapist again, do it. But you’re the one who didn’t want to keep working with your doctor in New York. After all this time, don’t try to rope me into going with you, because what you’re doing is somehow about me. I’m not the one who has a problem dealing with things.
Except that he was stalking her all over the neighborhood, and arguing with her in the middle of the night while their boys slept at home. Because he missed his wife so badly, he was losing his mind. He reached for her again, a man grasping for the crumbs of his happy life. She backed even farther away, gutting him.
“You’re going to get through this,” he insisted. “You’re not alone, Sam. I’ll help. We all will. I know you don’t think I understand, but that day at Chandler was hard for me, too. It was a terrible reminder of what it was like on 9/11, and we can talk about that. But Cade’s okay. We’re all safe. Our entire family is right here on the lane, the same as we were before, and we’re going to be ok—”
“Stop it!” His wife, the other half of himself, was looking at him as if he’d m
ade all this happen. “Stop—”
“Believing in us?” he snapped with a fresh surge of almost hatred. “Wanting us? Fighting for something normal and safe and peaceful for our family, the way you and I have all these years, only now you’re giving up? All while you’re helping someone else’s child in secret, because it means you can feel better about checking out on the rest of us?”
He wasn’t being fair. She’d never not been there for their sons, all three months she’d been at Julia’s. But fuck being fair.
She’d flinched when he’d raised his voice, but she was closer now. And he was shaking, his fists clenched, the control he’d spent a lifetime mastering deserting them both until he found himself fighting back tears. His terribly hurt wife looked as if she wanted to reach out and soothe him, and instead of relief, all he could feel was shame—and even more anger that she’d pushed them to this.
“I need you to stop,” she said. “Stop trying to get me to say that I’m okay with nearly being shot, or nearly watching our son be shot, or nearly being blown off the face of the earth on 9/11, or watching babies lose their parents. I stood there in our son’s cafeteria, Brian, and watched a boy we know who’d already killed another kid very nearly take away Nate and Cade, too…”
She did reach for him now, her hand shaking and cold and clinging. He’d seen this before, in New York, and she was unrecognizable to him in these moments. Someone beyond her own reach and his. The woman holding on to him was a broken reflection of his bride of more than fifteen years. And she was saying that the only way he could keep her was to fall apart with her, instead of holding on to the last of the strength and faith that had gotten them this far.
“I need you to stop,” she begged.
“Damn you.” It was a whispered curse, but his throat hurt as if he were shouting. He’d had enough. Three months of enough. “How selfish can you be? You’re out of control. And you’re a coward, Sam. You want me to stop? Why? So you can feel better about quitting everything we’ve fought so hard for? Because that’s what you’re doing. You’re quitting on me, the boys, our life here. You’re throwing it all away, everything we’ve built. You’re throwing us away, and you want me to help you.”
Three Days on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel) Page 7