The Secret Life of Sam

by Kim Ventrella

  He was heading back toward the car, wallowing in his bad luck, when Aunt Jo yelped. He turned and watched in amazement as the dragonfly, the one he’d just smashed to death, motored straight for Aunt Jo’s face before changing direction and zipping up past her ear, into the dead branches. Sam tried to follow its flight, but the glare of the sun blocked his view.

  “Imagine that,” Aunt Jo said, once she’d calmed down enough to catch her breath. “A dragonfly in these parts. I wonder if he hitched a ride from the bayou.”

  Sam was wondering that too.

  Aunt Jo peeked into the hollow of the tree and then came back up shaking her head. “Oh well, what would life be without a little mystery? That’s what your pa used to say.” She gave Sam a pat on the shoulder that almost knocked him to his knees. “Come on, we’ll drive past the school and then grab some food on our way to the house. You hungry? Gina’s Diner makes a chicken-fried steak as big as your head, and it’s free if you eat it in under forty-five minutes.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Suit yourself.” She tried to give his shoulder a squeeze, but he shrugged free from her grip and headed back toward the car.

  By the time Aunt Jo got in, Sam was already sitting on his side, cheek pressed against the half-open window.

  “Everything all right? You feel carsick?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Headache?”

  “No.”

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  Sam swallowed. What could he say? That he didn’t want to be here. That she was some stranger and he planned to run away the first chance he got or report her for kidnapping. That maybe he was losing it, because he’d just seen a cat disappear into thin air and what did it even matter? Grape-soda Holler, Oklahoma. Grape-soda cat.

  “No.”

  Sam waited for Aunt Jo to start the car and stop looking at him like she expected a different answer. Finally the engine rumbled to life, sending a fresh wave of vibrations up his backside. He relaxed a little once they started moving. He was still trapped, but at least he wasn’t standing still.

  As they passed the tree, Sam searched for signs of the cat or the dragonfly, but didn’t see any. He tried to remember where he could have seen the cat before, with its face all smashed in and healed over, but his mind had gone blank.

  Aunt Jo started telling stories again as they passed the school, but Sam didn’t listen. It wasn’t that he was trying to be a jerk, just that his head would probably explode if he heard one more word. Especially since all of Aunt Jo’s stories had to do with Pa, and she kept talking about him like he was hers and not just some guy she hadn’t seen or called for the past four years, even last Christmas when Pa’s leg nearly got run over by a lawn mower.

  “Chicken-fried steak or meat-loaf special?” she said.

  Sam looked up and realized that they had pulled to a stop in front of a dumpy-looking diner with cinder-block walls and an old ice machine beside the doors pumping out gray smoke.

  “Neither.”

  “I’ll get you the lasagna, then, but fair warning: it tastes like sweaty cheese and week-old hot dogs.”

  “Fine.”

  Aunt Jo lingered like she was waiting for him to change his mind, but he didn’t, and finally she left him alone and went inside. He watched out the window as this dad tried to get his kid to put on a seat belt, but the kid kept kicking the back of the seat and refusing to do it, and then finally the dad gave up and drove off anyway, even though that kid was just one big windshield splat waiting to happen.

  When Aunt Jo came back, the whole car filled up with this sweaty-hotdog-cheese smell. She’d ordered him a soda too, a Sprite even though he only drank Orange Crush, but he didn’t say anything because his throat was still scratchy from the wind and, besides, he wasn’t thirsty.

  “This is it,” Aunt Jo said when they pulled up to a big two-story house painted Easter-egg yellow. It had these little towers that reminded Sam of a doll’s house, but he couldn’t picture Aunt Jo living inside since he was pretty sure she’d never played with dolls.

  She turned off the engine and they sat in the car swimming in a fog of barfy lasagna scent. “Welcome home,” Aunt Jo said, and her voice had this grape-soda wobble, and Sam turned to look at her like she’d sprouted tentacles from her eye sockets.

  “This isn’t my home.”

  “No,” she said, and she didn’t even argue, but just sat there, taking a bunch of deep breaths instead. “You come inside when you’re ready.”

  He could feel her looking at his face and he wished she’d stop and go away, and finally she did. He opened his door to let out some of the lasagna stink that lingered even though Aunt Jo had taken the Styrofoam boxes inside. He didn’t actually want to be mean to Aunt Jo or call her a monster, even in his head, but she really was a monster if she thought he could ever see this place as home.

  He kicked the dashboard and the glove compartment opened, and he found an old pack of Kleenexes with the edges turned yellow and a small plastic photo album with pictures of Pa and Aunt Jo and Pops and some with Sam as a baby. He flipped through them, except the pages were so old that the plastic stuck together and he had to peel them apart like slices of American cheese.

  The more he flipped through the pictures, the more they started to make him mad. Who was Aunt Jo to keep pictures of him and Pa? Just some weird lady who never answered her phone or came to visit, and so why keep pictures anyway? Probably so she could show them off to all her made-up friends and pretend like she had a family when she really didn’t. Family came home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they answered the phone when your dad got his foot run over by a riding lawn mower and you didn’t know what to do since all you got when you dialed 911 was a busy signal.

  It was dark by the time Sam finally went inside the house.

  The dollhouse looked like this: an entryway with an ugly glass table, mail stacked neatly in one corner, numbered keys hanging on hooks. A living room on the right that was bigger than Sam’s whole house but with crappy furniture: an army-green sofa with the stuffing coming out, a coffee table, a TV tray on either end of the couch but no TV, a wall of dusty bookshelves, a piano with newspapers stacked on the keys, pictures of Pops and Pa and Sam, pictures of Aunt Jo in her army uniform, a glass cabinet filled with fat baby figurines, angels, and a bunch of grape-soda Jesus statues, a whole lot of empty space. A kitchen on the left: vinyl flooring peeling up at the edges, a stained countertop, a round table with a plastic sunflower tablecloth, more pictures on the fridge.

  Aunt Jo was standing at the sink clinking dishes. Sam stood in the hallway that separated the kitchen from the living room and watched her scrub meat-loaf juice off a yellow plate.

  “Food’s in the oven,” she said without turning around, but Sam didn’t move because he wasn’t hungry and he didn’t want to give Aunt Jo the satisfaction.

  She finished cleaning the plate and put it in the drying rack, and then she walked right past him back into the living room. It turned out she did have a TV, except he hadn’t recognized it because it was the kind that looked like a big wooden box and besides it had been covered by another ugly tablecloth. She peeled back the tablecloth and settled down on the green couch. It squeaked like a dead pig when she sat on it. She turned on the fishing channel, which was also Pa’s favorite, and Sam stood there in the space between the kitchen and the living room feeling like an alien in the world’s ugliest dollhouse.

  He waited for the commercials to come on, and then the next round of commercials, and finally he decided that maybe he was hungry after all and anyway he wasn’t going to let Aunt Jo stop him from eating. He opened up the oven and breathed in the scent of warm hot dogs and sweaty cheese. The smell awakened the feeling he’d had on the car ride up here, like his brain was stuffed full of tissues and he would maybe barf if he didn’t get some air.

  Still, his stomach ached, and when he stood in the kitchen and put the first bite in his mouth with a fork
he found in the drying rack, it tasted a little better than barf. Not much better, but a little. He ate the whole thing standing up and then he looked around for the dishwasher, because that’s where dirty dishes go, but didn’t find one. Then he remembered Aunt Jo washing her plate by hand and he saw the dish soap and the rag but he didn’t want to start washing it because then Aunt Jo would hear him from the living room and know what he was doing.

  He stood there for a while holding his dirty plate. Nothing went through his head, except that he was standing in a different city than he’d been standing in that morning. Besides that, everything inside was blank. Finally he gave up and washed the dish, only he squirted out too much soap so he ended up filling the entire sink with suds.

  “How about dessert?” Aunt Jo said from the archway. He froze. Maybe if he stood really still and didn’t breathe, then he wouldn’t really be here standing in an ugly yellow kitchen with a stranger asking him grape-soda questions like How about dessert?

  “No thanks.”

  “You like chocolate? I’ve got half a chocolate pie in the fridge.”

  That was a trick question because she knew he liked chocolate ever since the time she’d come to visit on his fifth birthday and he’d snuck away to the kitchen and eaten half the chocolate cake and everyone had caught him sitting on the cake plate covered in frosting.

  “I like vanilla.”

  Aunt Jo frowned. She looked like a picture of an angry, leather-faced turtle Sam had seen once in a library book.

  “Okay, well, it’ll be there if you want some.”

  “I won’t.”

  Aunt Jo didn’t say anything. Sam could feel her looking at him, and he waited for her to get angry or say that she was disappointed in his attitude or make some other grape-soda move, but she didn’t. She just stood there and he stood there, and he felt kind of like Jimmy Erickson, who was this blue jay from school who once made the lunch lady cry, but so what?

  (Pa said blue jay whenever he really wanted to say jerk, since blue jays are the jerks of the bird world and they spend all day making other birds miserable.)

  “How about I show you to your room?”

  Sam shrugged like he didn’t care either way, but really he was ready to go to sleep. He grabbed his backpack from the hall and his suitcase and the De Havilland Mosquito bomber and followed Aunt Jo upstairs. Her metal leg moved almost as smoothly as her right, and Sam had to take the steps two at a time to keep up.

  “This is my room here, and you’re this way at the end of the hall.” Sam took a quick look inside Aunt Jo’s room and saw a single wooden chair with a pile of neatly folded clothes on the edge of a bed. The bed looked hard, like maybe she had a block of wood underneath instead of a mattress.

  His room was all the way at the other end, which was fine by him.

  “You’ve got extra sheets in the closet and towels. Your bathroom’s through here so we don’t have to share, but I do expect you to keep it clean.”

  He looked around at everything but didn’t really look because he didn’t want to do it in front of Aunt Jo and, besides, he didn’t plan on staying.

  “There’s a new toothbrush and toothpaste in the bathroom, soap too.” She waited. He didn’t want to look at her face, so he looked at her shoes instead, white orthopedics, and at her pants, the left leg billowing out around her metal ankle, and at her fingers that kept tugging on the poker chip she wore around her neck. He wanted her to leave, but she didn’t.

  She came in close like maybe she was going to hug him, only he took a step back and hit the edge of the bathroom door instead.

  “Sorry,” she said as the door rattled. She reached for him, but then she didn’t and her hands went back to tugging on her necklace. “Well, I’ll let you get unpacked.”

  He nodded because maybe that would make her go away. Aunt Jo went to stand in the doorway but didn’t leave. “If you need anything, I’m right down the hall.”

  Nod.

  “Good night, Sam. I’m glad you’re here.”

  Nod.

  “If you need anything . . .”

  He stood still, neck throbbing from looking down at his shoes, and finally he heard the door click. He let his bags slump off his shoulders and drop to the floor.

  4

  MAYBE IT WAS ONLY EIGHT o’clock and maybe he didn’t want to lie down in the grape-soda bed with the scratchy green blanket, but he did it anyway. He didn’t unpack or open the brand-new toothbrush or take off his shoes. He did turn off the lights and open the puke-green curtains so he could look out at the ugly Oklahoma sky.

  The bed was hard, like maybe all the beds in this house were made of wood instead of foam or feathers or whatever mattresses were usually made of. He closed his eyes. Maybe he fell asleep, because he woke up to someone scratching on the window. A long shadow stretched across the floor, lit from behind by moonlight. It must have been the moon, but it shone so bright it reminded him of headlights. The shadow reached up and dragged long fingernails down the glass.

  It was like that time when he was little and he’d woken up with one foot in the swamp because he’d been sleepwalking, only he didn’t know that yet and he couldn’t figure out where he was or how he’d gotten so wet. He sat up and his clothes were one big pool of sweat, and the shadow kept beating at the window with this slow, steady beat and then the screech of sharp nails.

  He shook his head to see if he was dreaming, and then he wondered if maybe he’d walked all the way to the neighbors’ house in his sleep, but that was impossible since the closest neighbors were all the way across the swamp. He slid off the bed, which was hard as wood, and realized he was still wearing his shoes.

  The room swam into focus around him. He saw the suitcase, the backpack, the De Havilland bomber with a broken propeller. And then he saw the shadow man clawing at his window to be let in. Except then the shadow wobbled and shrank, and it didn’t look like a man anymore but a cat.

  Shivering a little thanks to the sweat dripping down his back, he opened the window. The metal shrieked. He stepped back as the cat leaped from the windowsill to the bed in a single bound. It was the same cat with the smashed-in face. The one Sam could swear he’d seen before, only how could he have? A cat with half a face wasn’t exactly easy to forget.

  Without stopping to acknowledge Sam’s presence, the cat scratched at Sam’s pillow like he owned the place, fluffing it into a puffy nest and then settling down with his head tucked into his belly. He blinked and studied Sam with his glowing silver eye.

  Sam stared back, and then the cat covered his face with his tail, as if to say enough with the staring already, and soon he was snoring. Partly Sam was thinking who did that cat think he was sneaking into his room in the middle of the night and stealing his pillow? Partly he was glad for the company, because he remembered now that this wasn’t his room or his house or even his state, and a creepy cat was better company than no one at all.

  He looked around the room and saw a clock that he hadn’t noticed the night before. It sat on top of a red dresser and was shaped like a plane with a clock dial for a propeller. 5:27 a.m. Sam looked around to see all the things he hadn’t bothered to notice the night before because he hadn’t wanted to see them: the red dresser right across from the wood-block bed with a different fish painted on every drawer, that clock shaped like a World War II biplane, cowboy wallpaper with the same Wild West saloons and gunslingers on horseback repeated every few feet, a rope hung up on the wall with nails like it was about to lasso one of the wallpaper horses, a nightstand on either side of the bed, one with the same crusty yellow lamp as downstairs, one with three photographs in tiny silver frames.

  Sam walked over to the other side of the bed, his shoes creaking on the floorboards. He sank down on the mattress, opposite the cat, and that wrinkly old gutter rat kept right on snoozing. One by one he picked up the photographs and examined the black-and-white images. The first showed a girl in overalls towering over a runty boy with a mischievous smile. He was
holding up a line full of fish, and she was scowling down at him with her arms crossed over her chest. Even a stranger could pick out Pa, with his smile that tilted more to the right than the left and that sparkle in his eyes that said he was fixing to get into a whole heap of trouble. Aunt Jo looked like a giant next to Pa, even though she was supposed to be the baby sister, and her expression was just as sour and cold-hearted as ever.

  The second was a photo of Pops, except he had dark hair combed down tight around his ears instead of a puffy white cloud and he had his arm around the biggest hog Sam had ever seen. The hog had a medal around its neck and Pops was smiling like he’d just won the lotto, so it must have been from some old state fair.

  Sam set the frame down carefully and then picked up the third. His stomach seized before he even had a chance to look close. A single gray eye stared up at him, though he was pretty sure it would have shone silver had the photo been in color. It was another picture of Pa as a boy, but in this one he was all alone except for the mangy ball of fur spilling from his arms.

  “Mother, Mary, and Joseph,” Sam said, which wasn’t just Aunt Jo’s favorite way of expressing surprise, but Pa’s too.

  He looked over at the cat snoozing in his spot and then back at the cat in the photo. True, the moon wasn’t too bright and he hadn’t bothered to turn on a light, but how many cats could there be with only half a face? How many cats with the exact same puckered skin and a nose that looked half normal and half like mashed-in Play-Doh?

  Sam stood up, still gripping the frame like maybe that cat was some kind of feline vampire with a secret plan to suck his blood. The cat didn’t wake up, though, no matter how long Sam stood there, and so he went and sat in the windowsill where he could keep an eye on him. His heartbeat calmed down as the cat’s snoring got louder. He didn’t know much about vampires, but probably they didn’t snore.