by Brady Hammes
“I do! But I’m also engaged to another man. And I don’t know how to reconcile those two things.”
“I just told you how!” Gavin tried to compose himself.
“I can’t call off my wedding to run away with a guy I barely know,” Mariana said.
Gavin looked at his bags sitting by the front door of this home that wasn’t his. “Do you love me?”
“I think so,” she said carefully.
“Then you should call it off,” he said, as if that settled it.
“But I love Jesse too,” she replied.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Yes it does, Gavin. Love isn’t an absolute.”
“Well, I believe it is.”
“Then you don’t know much about love.”
“And you don’t know much about fidelity.”
The line went silent. Gavin thought he heard a whimper on the other end. “Don’t cry,” he said, “you brought this on yourself.”
“I know that! Fuck, Gavin! What do you want me to say? I’m a shitty person. I’m a cheating whore. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I should go,” Gavin said. “I need to finish packing.”
“So this is it?” she asked, her voice catching.
“Apparently.”
“Will you be back?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll be in touch. Enjoy the wedding.” He tapped off his phone and stared at the sun sliding behind the mountains. There it was. The thing he’d feared had come to pass. And how could it not? He was a fool to believe otherwise.
* * *
—
HE COULDN’T SLEEP, SO shortly after midnight he got in his car and left. He dropped the key to the house in Mariana’s mailbox and began the drive to Chicago. Fuck it, he thought. He’d do the whole thing in one straight shot. Like a long-haul trucker. Like a brokenhearted long-haul trucker. Fifteen miles outside of Taos, his phone rang. It was strange that anyone would be calling him this late at night, stranger yet that it was an international number.
“Is this Gavin?” the voice asked. It was a female voice.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Hey, Gavin. You don’t know me. My name’s Marie. I’m Sam’s roommate at the dance company in Russia. I need to talk to you about your sister.”
SAMANTHA
SHE ARRIVED AT O’HARE AT 1:20 A.M. on December 23rd. The newsstands were boarded up for the night, the restaurants all closed: TGI Friday’s, Cinnabon, Dunkin’ Donuts, that windy city staple. She collected her bags and followed the signs for trains to the city. She fed a twenty to the ticket machine, grabbed her Ventra card, and boarded a nearly empty carriage toward the loop. There was a man sleeping at the front, his head resting on a backpack wedged between his shoulder and the window, and across the aisle sat a Korean businessman with a small rolling suitcase, his face reflecting a strain of exhaustion Sam recognized in herself.
When she’d finally emailed her itinerary, her mom had written back offering to pick her up at the airport, but Sam knew it would be an ungodly hour, particularly for her mother, who rarely stayed up past ten. Sam had told her not to worry, she could take the train, simpler for everyone really, to which her mom had acquiesced more easily than she’d expected. But as Sam made her way down empty corridors hung with portraits of stoic Native Americans, she’d secretly hoped to find her mom waiting at baggage claim, ready to whisk her home and tuck her into bed, make her soup and stroke her hair while she spent however many days it would take to claw her way out of this awful pit of despair. But she also knew how unrealistic that was. It would never happen, because she was too ashamed of what she’d become, of how she’d failed, so she would continue hiding, deflecting, obscuring, in the hope that the unspeakable truth would never be revealed.
When the train finally bolted to life, Sam watched the soft edges of the city reveal themselves. It was a seamless continuation of her life in Russia, white and cold and carelessly lit. As the train gained speed she held tight to her suitcase, which pulled away from her in the turns. Through the window, she saw warehouse distribution centers outlined in colorful lights and a thirty-foot-tall wooden reindeer standing sentinel outside a Best Buy. She watched a snowplow carve a swath of black down the Kennedy Expressway, a line of cars following close behind like obedient schoolchildren. It was a forty-minute ride into the city, so Sam put on a pair of headphones and listened to orchestral post-rock, reliving childhood memories in the poorly attended theater of her mind.
When she was fourteen, she attended a four-week summer dance intensive in Los Angeles. Her instructor had encouraged the program as a way to maintain focus during the summer months, when most students abandoned the studio for indolent afternoons back in their hometowns. The program was based out of Pepperdine, in Malibu, a private university with glamorous views of the Pacific. Sam brought the glossy ten-page brochure home to her parents, who looked it over one night after dinner and, to Sam’s surprise, agreed to let her go despite the two-thousand-dollar price tag. As far as her parents could tell, their daughter had no hobbies outside ballet, and they worried that if she didn’t fill her summer with dance, she might be lured into some kind of unsupervised teenage underworld. So on the last Monday in June, Sam’s mom dropped her off at O’Hare with a hundred dollars’ spending cash and instructions to remember why she was going to California. Sam smiled and kissed her mom goodbye and disappeared through the sliding glass doors, feeling gloriously free. It was her first time traveling alone, and she arrived at her gate far too early. She bought a latte and the newest issue of Vogue, and sat at the airport terminal like the sophisticate she aspired to be.
Her roommate at the camp was a girl named Marie, whose father had sent her to L.A. under the misguided belief that a month in Malibu might cure the wild streak she’d acquired after her parents’ divorce. But Marie wasn’t into the idea of wasting her summer indoors when the gentle wash of the Pacific beckoned from across the highway. She spent her days marking through movements in the studio, but after dinner she’d disappear down to the beach to hang out with whatever cute boys offered her beer. One day she met a surfer named Rusty, the son of a music producer, an exceptionally handsome boy whom Marie described in exquisite detail later that night. Sam had been militant about her dance, remembering very clearly her mother’s instructions. She was aware of what this trip was costing her parents, and she didn’t intend to squander the opportunity. But she was also a curious fourteen-year-old away from home for the first time in her life, and it seemed crazy not to allow herself even a taste of the California lifestyle.
For the first few days, she towed a fine line between sticking to her dance commitments and providing cover for her roommate’s adventures. Marie returned to their room one day with a page she’d torn from a surf catalog. It featured a shirtless teenage boy with an Al Merrick board tucked under his arm staring longingly out to sea. This, Marie explained, was Rusty’s best friend, Teddy, amateur surfer and professional catalog model. Sam was excited by the idea of a double date, especially if he looked anything like he did in the picture. Marie told Sam that Teddy was totally her type and arranged for them to meet the following night at a party at Rusty’s house. After curfew, they snuck out of the dorms and walked a half mile south along the PCH. The house was empty when they arrived, and Sam suggested they go home, watch a movie, and call it a night, but Marie wasn’t interested in that. She let herself into the house, Sam following close behind, and walked out to the deck, where they found Rusty and Teddy firing bottle rockets into the sea. Rusty explained that the party was kind of a bust due to his forgetting to invite people. He apologized by whipping up a pitcher of margaritas, which Sam enjoyed more than she would have expected. She’d never tasted alcohol aside from a couple sips of her grandpa’s beer, but the yellow Slurpee-like things Rusty was serving went down surprisingly easy. After a couple rounds, Rusty suggested they g
o for a moonlight swim.
Feeling the pleasant effects of good tequila, Sam followed Marie and the boys down to the sand, where they shed their clothes and skipped into the water. Under more sober circumstances she would have balked at the idea of undressing in front of strangers, but she figured this was just how they did it in California, and she didn’t want to be the prude who sat on the beach while everyone else frolicked in the sea. She peeled off her tank top, dropped her jean shorts, and, wearing only her underwear, jogged sheepishly toward the water. Teddy, who had swum a good distance out, was now trudging back to shore, his member, Sam could clearly see, standing at full attention, like a fleshy periscope breaching the water’s surface. It was the first time she’d ever seen the male organ in such a pronounced state, and there was something unsettling about the way it protruded upward, defying gravity. Instead of acknowledging this thing that seemed to her like a new, uninvited member of the party, Teddy simply grabbed her by the hand and escorted her back into the water. She dove beneath a breaking wave and surfaced on the other side, but Teddy was gone. She could see the soft outline of Marie and Rusty a hundred yards down the beach, locked in a serious make-out session. Teddy finally surfaced and grabbed her by the waist, pulling her close, both of them treading water. “I’m really glad I met you,” he said, a big goofy grin breaking across his face.
Was he though? she wondered. Because in their two hours together, he hadn’t asked her a single question aside from her name, which she wasn’t even sure he remembered. He didn’t ask her about dance camp or where she was from or what she thought of California. The entirety of their so-called “date” had consisted of the two girls sitting awkwardly on the couch, while Teddy and Rusty recounted the summer’s most epic waves.
“I’m glad you’re so chill,” Teddy said, wrapping his legs around her waist. “Most girls I meet aren’t nearly as chill as you.”
Sam wasn’t sure what to do with that compliment. In fact, she wasn’t even sure it was a compliment. It had a hollow ring to it, the kind of canned charm she’d seen in movies, and she fought the urge to roll her eyes. It was also hard to take him seriously with his penis bobbing against her thigh.
“I think I’m gonna head back in,” she finally said, and swam back to shore. She dried off with Teddy’s towel, slipped back into her clothes, and scanned the beach for Marie and Rusty, who had disappeared, leaving her alone with this dim boy. Teddy arrived a moment later and spread his towel on the sand. “Have a seat,” he said. “The stars are pretty sick tonight.”
That was when she should have bid Teddy farewell and hightailed it back to campus. That was when she should have written her phone number on the palm of his hand and said to call if he ever matured into a gentleman looking for a proper date. But instead, she joined him on the towel and watched him remove a glass pipe from his backpack. “You smoke?” he asked.
“Like cigarettes?”
Teddy laughed. “No. Weed.”
“Oh yeah,” Sam said, though the truth was that she did not.
Teddy handed her the pipe. She put it to her mouth, inhaled, and coughed a few times. “Good stuff,” she said, handing it back.
“Sativa,” Teddy said. “Very heady.”
Sam waited for something to happen, but all she felt was a burning sensation in her throat.
“Lie down,” Teddy said, patting the towel. She leaned back and stared up at the sky, listening to Teddy spout some questionable facts about the Big Dipper. Why? she wondered. Why did she just do that? Why did she just smoke something she knew nothing about? It had all happened so quickly, and now this drug was swirling around inside of her, doing unknown things to her body, staining her organs in ways that would probably register on some future drug test she hadn’t even considered. Shit, shit, shit! She felt the regret crash over her as Teddy’s hand worked its way up her leg.
And now, as Chicago’s skyline presented itself, she recognized that night on the beach in Malibu as a sort of pivotal life event. It wasn’t so much that she’d smoked pot, which she knew was an inevitable teenage rite of passage, but rather the circumstances in which it had occurred, the way she had let it happen with so little consideration. She had been careless then and she was careless now, and almost all the anguish in her life could be attributed to this crucial flaw.
The train stopped at Clark and Lake. She hurried down the metal stairs and began the short walk to her parents’ apartment. Technically, she was returning home, though she’d never visited her folks’ new place, and she had to reference her phone for directions, an irony that hinted at some greater meaning she couldn’t articulate. She headed south on State Street, past the Joffrey, where she’d spent so much time as a kid, the origin of her doomed journey. She felt as if she’d come full circle, though not in any sort of conclusive, satisfactory way. Looking up at her old practice space made her realize how far off course she’d drifted, framed with chilling clarity the magnitude of her miscalculations.
She passed beneath the gilded trumpets perched above Macy’s. The mechanical Christmas vignettes in the large picture windows had powered down for the day, but Sam stopped to have a look. A young girl sat atop a reindeer, while Santa watched benevolently from a wooden rocking chair. She’d always enjoyed Chicago during the holidays, though she wouldn’t admit that to anyone. She liked wandering downtown, seeing the skeletal trees veined with yellow lights. She liked watching the ice skaters at Millennium Park and the tourists posing for pictures next to the lions outside the Art Institute. For a girl her age, with her interests and her left-leaning politics, it was terribly unhip to find comfort in the yuletide-industrial complex, but she did. Or more specifically, she had. Maybe she’d outgrown those feelings or maybe she’d just been away for too long, but Christmas held no allure for her now. Right now, nothing seemed very appealing, which was the simplest way of explaining her condition. She’d been lying to herself for months, convinced that whatever happened next would be the catalyst for some grand transformation, but nothing ever came, and now she wasn’t sure if she deserved anything other than the dark cast her life had acquired.
* * *
—
WHEN SHE ARRIVED AT the condo, the door to the building was locked so she pounded on the glass, rousing the doorman from sleep. He walked to the door and cracked it enough to stick his head out. He wore a suit and a wool fedora.
“Hi,” Sam said. “My parents live here. Six oh eight. I think my mom mentioned that I was coming.”
“Right,” the doorman said. “You must be Sam. Come in, it’s cold out there. Sorry, I fell asleep for a minute.”
Sam entered the lobby. The walls were hung with framed faux-vintage posters for the 1893 World’s Fair. There was a tiny koi pond surrounded by white leather armchairs. “Your mom’s pretty excited to have all of her kids home,” the doorman said, leading her toward the elevator. “She’s been talking about it for weeks. You have some brothers coming too, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, a little taken aback by how much he knew about her family. She imagined her mother chewing the poor guy’s ear off, exaggerating her children’s accomplishments, bombarding him with motherly anecdotes about each one. She felt a rush of mortification followed by another rush of guilt for being embarrassed by her mother’s love. The truth was that her mom missed her, and she missed her mom too, and if she could ever get over the stupid guilt she felt about being born into a family that loved one another without condition, then maybe she could enjoy her time here.
She got off at the sixth floor and dragged her suitcase down the hall. The door was unlocked, so she entered quietly, careful not to wake her parents. Inside, it was dark, the only light coming from the glow of a Christmas tree planted in the corner of the living room. It was now close to 3:00, her parents no doubt asleep, her brothers yet to arrive. She walked to the wall of windows looking out toward the lake. It was an incredible view, unobstructed d
espite being only six stories aboveground. A sliding glass door gave way to a sliver of balcony, which was blanketed with an inch of untouched snow.
“Hi, sweetie,” came her mother’s voice, softly.
She turned and saw her mom standing in the door to her bedroom, squinting in the dull light, smiling through her sleepiness. Sam stood and walked to her, put her arms around her. “Hi, Mom.”
“Did you just get here?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think of the place?”
“It’s great,” Sam said, looking around.
“It’s perfect for your dad and me,” her mom said. “A little small with all you kids home, but I guess we’ll survive.”
“We will,” Sam said, wondering if it was true.
A silence settled between them. “Well,” her mom finally mumbled over a yawn. “I’m going back to bed. Let’s catch up in the morning. You’re in the little room, first door down the hall.”
“Good night,” Sam said.
“I’m glad you’re home,” her mom said, closing the door behind her.
Sam pulled her suitcase to her room, unpacked enough to find her pajamas, then went to the bathroom to wash her face. The exhaustion she’d felt after landing had given way to a second wind, so she went to the kitchen, where she found a corked bottle of wine, which she helped herself to. She moved to the living room and sat on the couch and looked out toward the lake. The giant Ferris wheel on Navy Pier had gone into hibernation for the winter and most of the city looked strangely dark. Unlike New York, Chicago shut down at the end of each day, the businessmen and women fleeing to bedroom communities west of the city. She watched a man in a puffy down jacket and pajama bottoms lead a small dog outside to pee, but otherwise there were few signs of life at this late hour. Even the heartiest of the homeless had retreated to church beds once the sun dropped. The thermometer on the end table displayed an outside temperature of nine degrees, while on her side of the glass it was a comfortable seventy-two.