17

“GET UP,” Sam says. “Get up and come with me.”

I am lying on my back in my bedroom with my arms folded across my chest. I am staring at the white ceiling. Staring at the gravel. Not going anywhere.

This is what happens when you stick with home.

Staring. I can’t get through.

“Come with me, son. I want you right by my side.”

Sam’s voice is quiet and sweet.

Here I am: come to the end of a story I am unable to finish. If I lie here I can become solid—as hard and as rigid as a stainless steel vault. I will my muscles to freeze. I breathe only to exhale the fire that’s burning inside me.

“We come so far. Together. We just got this little bit left to go. We can make it. Come on.”

This is how the story goes. I can remember each and every blessed word. I can tell it with precision, with a razor sharp memory. I can make it seem just as if it is happening right now. For what it’s worth, because I can’t make it end any other way. I can’t make it come out with me strong, with me the hero.

I don’t look good at the end.

I didn’t know enough, you see. Try to understand. This is just the way it was.

“Look at what I have for you.”

I don’t want to see, yet I do see. Him strolling, sheepishly, across my room. Him laying the paper on my stomach.

“It’s for you.”

I stare.

He backs away out of the edge of my sight as if he were a dream. I close my eyes to make it all disappear. The stories I don’t control. The stories that aren’t my stories. I close my eyes to keep away the tears. I push out the walls with everything I’ve got.

“Took in my last load this week—of trash, dirt, of everything. Forever. That there is your deed and this one is mine. Fifty/fifty. Course we can switch halves. If you want. You can do whatever you want. I might build that roller coaster. Or take a trip to the moon. What are you gonna do, Marshall?”

I’m going to be whole and solid: I’m going to be a slab of carved marble. Not in some silly park. In a museum behind velvet ropes, where no one can touch me. I’m going to lie here on this bed forever and wish away the softening that is already starting at the edges.

“You can’t lie there forever, son. You’ll try, I bet. But you won’t. I’ll still be here anyway. When you open your eyes guess whose face you’ll see? So come on.”

He’ll be there forever—not even Houdini could make him disappear.

And they are inside my head anyway—all the Sams: the mean ones, the silly ones, the drunk ones, the silent ones. The ones with skin as thin as an onion. When I open my eyes, which Sam will I see?

I am already as soft as a cotton stuffed toy.

“Look at me.”

I turn my head. Open my eyes.

Sam is a tall man, about 6’4”. His shoulders are broad, every inch of him is solid, heavy with flesh. His head is large and square with skin the warm brown, almost red color of wet freshly turned earth. Large black glowing eyes. A mouth full of teeth that often smile without meaning to. Enormous feet—Sam has these enormous feet. And hands, huge hands. And … And there is Sam: nodding, becoming a watery blur.

“My sweet Rosey. I love her,” he shrugs. “You’re gonna have to trust me. We—all of us—we gonna live happily ever after. I just love her.”

Is that true? Did I know? Would it have made any difference?

Yes.

Because that is a different story altogether.

Instead:

this is how I am to be lost: lying on my back, pretending forever to be only myself. Dissolved, no longer ignoring the huge hands reaching out for me, like a magnet, pulling me to the end, to the end of this story. This story.

If only I’d known.

Instead:

“Come on,” Sam says.

“Come.”