by Brady Hammes
SAMANTHA
SHE’D SPENT THE PAST HOUR in the bathroom, under the pretense of a long shower, though at some point she would be called forth to participate in the Christmas holiday, a harrowing prospect. She was hoping for a call from Max, just a quick hello, anything that might motivate her to stay clean, but in lieu of that she was content to sit on the tile floor, using the hairdryer to blow warm air across her face while debating whether to flush the remaining drugs down the toilet. With or without, clean or sober, there was no future she desired. She had nothing to look forward to. This drug had ruined everything. It had killed Atticus and destroyed her career and now it threatened to estrange her from her family. She had no sense of what came next, of where she would go from here. After the holiday, her brothers would leave and her parents would return to work, at which point she would be left scrambling for an excuse as to why she wasn’t headed back to Moscow. She’d tried calling Max earlier that morning, but he hadn’t answered. She assumed this was a conscious act of avoidance, which, on a professional level, she accepted, but which, on a more human level, broke her heart.
She looked at her phone: 8:40 A.M. She knew that something needed to change, and until she expelled the drugs from her life, nothing would. So now was the time. Goodbye to all of this, she thought, retrieving the small bag of drugs hidden in her makeup bag and flushing it down the toilet in a well-intentioned act of restraint she would soon regret. She popped a Klonopin to take the edge off, then changed into her workout clothes, slipped quietly out the front door, and went to find the gym, where she would attempt to exercise the demons from her body.
* * *
—
SHE ALMOST STOPPED AFTER the third mile, but three miles wasn’t enough, so she pushed on to four, then five, until her heart was ricocheting in her chest and her legs gave out and the treadmill deposited her, like a piece of airport luggage, on the gym floor. She looked up and saw a woman standing in front of a weather map on a small television mounted to the wall.
“You okay?” came a voice.
Sam saw a man standing over her. He had a pair of earbuds hanging around his neck, his face slick with sweat.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just tripped.”
“Careful now,” he said, helping her to her feet.
“Yeah, thanks.” She grabbed a paper-thin hand towel from a wicker shelf and wiped her face, then sat on an orange balance ball and drank water from a paper cone. The man who’d helped her—the only other person in the gym on Christmas morning—returned to the elliptical machine. Gyms were sad places, and gyms such as this one—windowless, in the basement of an apartment complex, with too few machines to be taken seriously—were particularly sad. Today was day one. Tomorrow would be day two, and so on and so forth until at some point she could stop counting. But she also knew it might be a while until she could stop counting. Maybe never. That’s how it was for some people—every day a struggle. Or, if not a struggle, a series of very important choices that, if not carefully considered, could negate all the choices that had preceded it.
* * *
—
BACK AT HER PARENTS’ APARTMENT, she felt better. Or marginally better. She didn’t want to tear off her skin, so that was something. The exercise had helped, and the smell of her mother’s cooking revived her appetite. Gavin was setting the table, while Jonah and their father watched a football game in the living room. Overnight, a handful of gifts had materialized beneath the tree.
“Merry Christmas,” her mother announced.
“Merry Christmas,” Sam said, hugging her mom from behind. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“Everything.” Sam wasn’t sure why she was apologizing, but it seemed necessary.
“Well, there’s no need to be sorry,” her mother said. “All is forgiven on Christmas morning.”
It was a nice thing to say, but Sam didn’t believe it. Forgiveness seemed like a distant concept she wasn’t entitled to, at least not yet.
“You’re all sweaty,” her mom said.
“I went to the gym.”
“Well, go clean up. Breakfast is almost ready.”
She showered and changed back into her pajamas, because that’s how she’d always done it on Christmas morning for as long as she could remember, and perhaps what her life needed was a return to tradition. She brushed her hair just enough to be presentable, then went to the kitchen and joined her family at the table, which was spread with croissants and fruit, as well as the egg casserole her mother made every year.
“You went to the gym on Christmas morning,” Jonah said. “I applaud your ambition.”
“I’m turning over a new leaf,” Sam said, draping her napkin across her lap. “This looks delicious.”
“Fill up,” her mom said, “because we aren’t eating again until dinner.”
Gavin looked to Sam. “Why?”
“What?” she asked.
“Why are you turning over a new leaf?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just feel like I’ve let myself go.” There was a pointedness to his question that made her uncomfortable.
“Yeah,” Gavin said. “I know the feeling.”
“I think you both look a little thin,” her mom said. “You need to eat.”
“What’s the food like over there?” her dad asked. “In Russia.”
“Lots of meat,” Sam said. “So I eat lots of salads.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever had Russian food,” her mom said. “Is it good?”
“Very,” Jonah said, somewhat unexpectedly. The collective gaze turned toward him. “Russian food that is.”
“When have you had Russian food?” Gavin asked.
“Few times,” Jonah said nonchalantly.
“Name a Russian dish.”
“Goulash.”
“That’s Hungarian.”
“White Russian.”
“That’s a cocktail.”
“Cocktails are food.”
“No,” Gavin said, “they aren’t.”
“Pass the fruit, please,” their mother said.
And so it went. After breakfast, they migrated to the living room, where their mom distributed the gifts, a role the kids had always coveted but which now held little interest for any of them. When they were younger, Gavin and Jonah used to wake Sam up in the middle of the night, and the three of them would sneak downstairs to see what Santa had left under the tree. They would use steak knives to make little slits in the gifts, just enough to see what was inside before carefully re-taping them shut. They were so close then, yet so distant now. Sam felt as though she hardly knew her brothers anymore, and she suspected they felt the same way. She still hadn’t seen Gavin’s show, and she couldn’t say with any certainty what Jonah did over in Africa. They rarely spoke anymore—not because they didn’t want to but because their lives had sent them in such divergent directions—and if it weren’t for the homeward pull of the holidays, she wondered when she would ever see them.
The day passed in a quiet leisure, everyone entertaining themselves with football games and phone calls to friends. That afternoon, they went to a movie together—a disastrous science fiction spectacle—and though the movie was unwatchable, Sam was grateful for the two hours she spent immersed in someone else’s problems. Afterward, they returned home and ate turkey and stuffing and scalloped potatoes—Sam eating only a few bites of the potatoes—then pumpkin pie, and drank the port their father brought home from a trip to Lisbon. As the day darkened and the holiday came to its conclusion, the sense of optimism she’d felt that morning began to wane. Max wasn’t going to call, and the drugs weren’t going to release her, and all the fear and dread she’d experienced upon arriving in Chicago came rushing back.
That night, she couldn’t sleep, though she rarely slept once the drugs had
faded and she was left to confront the yawning pit of sobriety. It was shortly before midnight according to the clock on the nightstand, and she got out of bed and walked to the living room, where Jonah was asleep on the couch, the canned laughter of a studio audience floating from the television. She moved to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator without desiring anything it contained. She opened and closed the cupboard doors, poked her head inside the pantry, looking for the thing she knew she wouldn’t find. She felt mildly possessed, as if there were something directing her body, guiding her from one corner of the apartment to the next. She went back to her bedroom, dressed, slipped into her coat, then the hallway, then the elevator. Once outdoors, she walked south to Jackson Street and took the stairs underground. She boarded an empty Red Line train to 95th/Dan Ryan. She had no destination in mind, only the need to keep moving to a place other than where she had been.
The train pulled to a stop at Forty-Seventh Street, and a homeless woman boarded with an IKEA bag overflowing with assorted treasures. She was dressed in a down jacket and sweatpants and rubber boots. She had somehow fit three different stocking caps onto her head and was staring intently out the window, muttering a silent prayer. “I hope you die for Christmas,” the woman said.
Sam wasn’t sure if the directive was intended for her or some imagined nemesis, but she kept her head down, staring at a circle of gum stamped to the floor. The woman began again, louder now, turning to Sam and pointing a dirty, calloused finger in her direction. “You hear me?” she yelled. “I got so much love in my heart, I swear to God. I got so much love in my heart, but ain’t none for your ass.” She stopped, wiped away a tear, and began again. “I hope you die for Christmas!”
The woman paced up and down the car, howling obscenities. When she reached one end of the train, she turned and shuffled back toward Sam. She stood above her and looked down at the top of Sam’s head. “You hear me, bitch? I hope you die for Christmas!”
“Please stop,” Sam said, head bowed, careful not to make eye contact.
“You listening to me?”
“Leave me alone. Please.”
“Die for Christmas!”
“Go away!” Sam screamed. Her eyes filled and she felt an intense fear, not only of this woman, but of her future, the impossible task awaiting her. She didn’t want to be in Chicago, but she didn’t want to be in Russia either. She wanted to be back on the plane, forever circling the globe, high above the cesspool of her circumstances. Instead, she was alone on a dark train, suffering through the menacing homily of a madwoman.
The train slowed to a stop and Sam stood to leave, but the woman grabbed her arm. “Listen to me,” the woman said, and for a moment, they stared at each other, two broken women on a train in the fading hours of Christmas. “I got so much love in my heart. I really do.” The woman went in for a hug, but Sam pulled free and slid through the closing train doors. From the platform, she watched the woman’s face disappear as the train carried her away.
She found the stairs and walked to the street above. She passed a laundromat that was closed, then a diner, also closed. She was looking for a face that could help her, but this was an unfamiliar part of the city and you had to know where to look for such faces, so she finally returned underground, to the dark warmth of the subway station. She stepped onto the platform and watched trains arrive and depart, the doors whooshing open for no one, then clapping shut and departing as quickly as they had arrived. If only she could control her longing, a longing that went so much deeper than the immediate desire for drugs, a longing for a release from her self-imposed prison, the fiction of her life. As she sat on a bench watching a rat pick at a discarded muffin, she tried to identify when the unraveling had begun. She could say it was the night when Atticus first offered her a taste, but even then something had been set in motion, a need still too small to identify but whose roots had already taken hold in her body, its tendrils strangling her volition, choking out the light.
She looked up and saw him standing above her, the face she’d been looking for, the stranger who could set her right. “You look like you need a friend,” he said.
* * *
—
SHE OPENED HER EYES and saw a dog, a large one, some kind of retriever, lying next to her on the bed, its furry, copper head resting on her thigh. She looked around the room, which she quickly realized was a hospital room, and located her brothers sleeping in plastic chairs, backlit by a large picture window overlooking the roof of an adjacent apartment building. She sat up and the dog lifted its head, looked at her with a face that offered little explanation. How did I end up here? she wondered. And then, aloud, to the dog: “Who are you?”
“That’s Cooper,” said a nurse dressed in Christmas-themed scrubs. She approached and chucked the dog behind the ear. “He took a real liking to you.”
The dog looked up at her briefly, then returned his head to her lap. “What’s it doing here?”
“We bring him around to cheer up the kids,” the nurse explained. “For some reason, he really wanted to see what was happening in your room, so I brought him in and he hopped right up in bed with you. You were sound asleep, of course, but Cooper didn’t care.” The nurse looked at the dog. “Did you, Cooper?” She moved and spoke in a way that suggested this was all very common, a young woman and a therapy dog sharing a hospital bed on the morning after Christmas.
“Is everything okay?” Sam asked.
“You tell me,” the nurse said, punching some buttons on the monitor above Sam’s head. She remembered very little from the night before. She remembered riding the train and the homeless woman yelling at her and then the man with the drugs, but nothing after that. “How did I get here?”
“A subway worker found you unconscious on the train platform. You were barely breathing. The EMT administered Narcan, which saved your life. Do you remember what you took?”
Sam shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter. That’s for someone else to sort out. The important thing is that you feel better.”
“Do you?” Jonah said, straightening in his chair, blinking awake.
“What?” Sam asked.
“Feel better.”
She wasn’t sure. Compared to what? she wondered. She had no reference point. She was warmer certainly, more comfortable lying in this bed than she probably was on the concrete floor of the subway station, but it would be disingenuous to say she felt better. Mostly what she felt was a mixture of confusion as to what exactly had transpired and gratitude that she was still alive to wonder at such things.
“I’ll let you guys have some privacy,” the nurse said. “A doctor will be in shortly to check on you.” She placed a clear plastic bottle on the tray next to Sam’s bed. “We’ll also need a urine sample for the toxicology screen whenever you feel up for it. Come on, Cooper,” she said, and the dog hopped off the bed and followed her into the hallway.
“What time is it?” Sam asked.
“Almost noon,” Jonah said, standing and stretching.
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. Since early morning?”
“Somebody called you?”
“They called him,” Jonah said, nodding toward Gavin, who was now awake, running his hands through his hair. “Apparently, you had him listed as your ICE contact in your phone.”
It was possibly the only responsible thing she’d done in the last year. In a way she’d always feared this scenario might come to pass, and she figured that if something terrible did happen, Gavin would be better equipped to handle the news than her parents. “Do Mom and Dad know?”
“No,” Gavin said. “And we went to considerable lengths to make sure they didn’t find out.”
“Thank you,” she said. There was a moment of silence as she considered the situation, what might happen next.
Jonah approached and took her h
and, rested his forehead against hers. “What’s going on?” he whispered, and with this simple gesture, she broke open.
“I don’t know,” she said, feeling the pinch in her throat, the tears coming down her cheeks.
Gavin walked to the other side of the bed and took her other hand. “We love you,” he said. “We love you and we want to help you. But you have to want our help.”
“I know,” she said. “I do.”
“Okay,” Gavin said, standing and walking to the window. “Then we need to figure out a plan.”
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“I think you know.”
“I’m not going to rehab if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Sam said, the mood in the room shifting abruptly.
“I think you should consider it,” Gavin said, walking back to her.
“I have. It’s not for me.”
“Then who’s it for?”
“Drug addicts.”
“Which doesn’t describe you?”
She hesitated. “No.”
Gavin scoffed. “Yet here you are in a hospital. How do you explain that?”
“I fucked up. Someone gave me something bad.” That part must have been true. There was no other explanation for how she’d ended up here. She looked around the room, wishing that dog would come back to distract her from her brother’s incessant questioning.
“Look, Sam,” Gavin said. “I love you, but it’s pretty obvious that your way of navigating this thing isn’t working.”
“Can we discuss this when we get home?” Jonah said, pacing the room. “Let her rest.”
“No,” Gavin said. “We can’t. We need to figure this out now.” Gavin turned back to Sam. “I found a clinic in Lincoln Park. I spoke with one of the women on the phone and she suggested you come by for a visit. I can go with you if you want.”
“That’s not gonna happen,” Sam said. She was already feeling better, and she didn’t see why she couldn’t do it on her own terms. This was just a slipup, albeit a pretty severe one, but she would turn it around.