Chapter 5
Sam wasn’t sure how long she’d sat, alone in the sunroom, sorting through the myriad emotions riding roughshod through the landscape of her soul, listening to Natalie and her mom make cookies.
It was morning. She should have been finishing up last minute Christmas shopping but she couldn’t summon the energy.
The wind slapped against the plastic her mom had used to insulate the sunroom. Sam curled up in the chair, cradling her mug of coffee, savoring the warmth.
Wishing the taste on her lips was still Patrick’s.
It would be so easy for her to drive to the bed and breakfast where he was staying. To open his door and slide into bed with him.
She could go back to pretending that everything was fine, that the smile on her lips was real. She could drive down Route 16 and ask him to forgive her. She could put their family back together again.
So why didn’t she?
She closed her eyes. Because she would be lying. To her daughter. To her lover.
To herself.
She looked up at the sound of a car pulling into her mom’s driveway. Her pulse beat a little faster at the thought of it being Patrick. She supposed that was a good sign—her body remembered how to feel even if the rest of her didn’t.
But it wasn’t Patrick. All the air left her lungs and she swallowed, trying to squelch the rising emotions that swelled at the sight of her second dad.
Thomas Carreau.
Melanie’s dad and the man who’d helped raise her after her father had hightailed it to Idaho when she’d been about six.
She wanted to run out into his arms. She wanted to hear him laugh and call her Samsquatch or one of the other terrible nicknames he was forever coming up with for her and Melanie.
But instead, she sat unmoving as he climbed the front porch and walked into her mother’s house without knocking.
Because he and Nancy had long ago become close friends—enough that her daughter noticed and knew about “Grammy and Thomas time”.
Sam was happy for her mom. She deserved someone to make her happy.
But Sam had been avoiding seeing Thomas since she’d come home. Had left the house the moment her mom mentioned he might come by. Had avoided any chance of running into him.
Because she wasn’t ready yet. She didn’t know if she’d ever be.
Except that he was here now and there was no more running.
“Hey, Nattie Bear.”
“Hi, Mr. Thomas,” came Natalie’s response.
“Where’s Grammy?”
“In the bathroom. She had a sour tummy from all the cookie dough.”
Sam smiled. Leave it to Natalie to share information that she was reasonably certain—no matter how close Nan and Thomas were—her mom would not want shared.
“Whatcha making?”
The exchange was normal. Completely ordinary. The kind of conversation that a grandfather would have with a granddaughter.
Except that Thomas would never have grandkids now.
“When my Melanie and your mommy were little, they used to bake chocolate chip cookies every Friday night and watch Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
“What’s that?”
“A show about a guy trapped on a space station with two robots forced to watch bad B movies for the rest of his life.”
Natalie laughed. “That sounds awful. TV in the old days must have really sucked.”
It was Thomas’s turn to laugh quietly. “Don’t underestimate it. There were some quality shows back in the dark ages of the 1980s.”
“Did you have electricity when mommy was growing up?”
“Of course we did. It was twenty some odd years ago, not last century. Well, I suppose it was last century. Anyway, yes, we had power and television and phones. Life wasn’t so different then.”
“But you didn’t have iTunes. You had to walk to the store for music.”
“Yes, and don’t forget about barefoot, uphill in winter. Sheesh, kiddo, you make a man feel his years.”
“Natalie, stop making Mr. Thomas feel old.” Nan had finally returned. Sam caught a reflection of her kissing Thomas quickly in greeting.
Why didn’t they just get married? Her mom was so damn weird.
“You can just call me Thomas,” he said to Natalie.
“My mommy says I have to call adults Mr. or Ms. because I’m a kid,” Natalie said.
“Then how about we just let it be our secret?”
“Nuh-uh. Mommy knows when I’m keeping secrets.”
“Yeah, well, Mommy doesn’t know everything.”
Sam took a deep breath and stepped into the kitchen. “It’s a Southern thing,” she said when she was sure her voice wouldn’t break. It did anyway. “Kids down south don’t call adults by their first names. At least not the ones I’ve been around.”
She braced for it, that shockwave of emotion crashing over Thomas’s face.
It rose violently, tearing at her insides, ripping open the chest wound that ached and bled for the sister she’d lost and the daughter he’d buried.
“Hi, Samwise.” His words were choked and thick.
She blinked rapidly, trying to keep the tears from cascading down her cheeks.
She failed.
And when his arms came around her, she surrendered to the wave of crushing sadness that dragged her under.
Natalie and her mom were making another batch of cookies. Gingerbread men this time, apparently. Sam and Thomas sat out in the sunroom. Sam was curled in one of her mom’s old wicker chairs, nursing a sad cup of coffee that was neither warm nor energizing. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t swallow past the block in her throat.
“We were just north of Baghdad,” Sam said quietly. “There hadn’t been any attacks in days. We were on patrol, meeting with a local sheik, trying to see what services they needed, what we could provide.”
“Did you leave the base often?” Thomas asked.
“We did. Mel was on the battalion commander’s personal security detachment, and I was with public affairs.” She shrugged. “We were always together. It was just like camp. Except for the explosions and all that.”
Thomas smiled. “You two were always into something. You and the damn Rierson boys and the McLaurin girls.”
Sam swallowed at the mention of Cass and Ashley McLaurin. She needed to go see Cass, but she hadn’t really thought through everything she was going to say.
Ashley—Cass’s sister—was still in Afghanistan. She didn’t know how to mourn one friend while worrying for others. It was too much, too overwhelming.
Still, seeing Thomas… For a moment, the floodgates had opened and released a cascade of grief and ragged anger. And for a moment, just a moment, it had felt good to release some of the pressure hiding in that black box she tried to ignore.
“Yeah. We had some good times,” she said. Because they had.
Before the war.
“She used to write home every night.” A long pause as he sipped his coffee. “I would always worry when I didn’t have a note. She tried to explain to me that sometimes, the phones and Internet were shut off because someone had gotten hurt or…”
“Yeah, we’d cut the communications when someone died because we don’t need families finding out about things on Facebook.”
He nodded, then reached for and squeezed her hand. “Thank you for telling me before the Army showed up on my doorstep.”
Sam’s throat closed off, and her eyes burned again. She’d violated the rules that day.
She hadn’t even given it a second thought. She’d been numb, dead inside when she’d picked up the phone in the signal officer’s office that was on the exemption list and placed the call.
“Your mom stayed with me the whole time.” His voice cracked a little. “It was the hardest day of my life. But couldn’t you have gotten into trouble?”
Her throat was tight, locked shut, making it difficult to speak, to breathe. “Sometimes, breaking the rules is the right thing to do.”
“Yeah, well, don’t go breaking any more rules for me. Melanie wouldn’t want you to get in trouble for her.”
Sam smiled. “No, she’d be mad at me for getting into trouble without her.”
“Yeah, she would, wouldn’t she.” Thomas chuckled. “I wonder where Nan and Natalie went off to?”
She frowned. “Mom said she was running into town for ice cream. Who eats ice cream in December in Maine?”
“Ah, everyone that I know. Ice cream isn’t seasonal. Except for peppermint stick.”
“You know you can’t find that down in Texas. Not the good stuff anyway. Just some crappy brand made with corn syrup. It’s so nasty.”
“Weren’t you going to take Natalie to finish Christmas shopping today?”
She glanced at the old clock on the beam above them. “I was thinking about it…”
“Well if you go, keep an eye on the weather. There’s a nasty storm coming in. Lake effect snow.”
“That’s what I’m hearing. We might wait until tomorrow, honestly.” She looked up, daring to meet his eyes. “How have you been? With everything?”
He scrubbed his hand over his scruffy grey beard, then leaned forward, folding his hands together. “When I lost Mel’s mom, I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever go through. I was wrong.” He looked up at her. “There’s a word for when a man loses his wife. Or a wife loses a husband. There’s no word for what I am now. Orphan parent is the closest thing I can come up with.” He shifted a little. “But I’ll get through it. You just try to keep going, try not to think about it too much because the sadness… Man, the sadness is like quicksand. It’ll suck you down before you even realize you’re sinking.”
Sam looked away. “Yeah.” It was all she could manage.
Thomas sighed heavily. “So what are you and your mom doing this week? And where’s your other half?”
Sam bit her lips, wishing at that moment that Thomas wasn’t as close with her mother as he was. But he knew Patrick. Knew that he’d been there from the start and raised Natalie like his own.
Knew that he was currently missing from the picture.
And Sam didn’t have a good explanation for it. She couldn’t put a name to the lack inside her. To the emptiness that was so deep and so dark that it felt like no light would ever penetrate it.
Someone told her that shadows were a good thing because it proved the light existed, that it was as real as whatever lurked in the shadows.
But when there was no light, there was nothing to push back the darkness. It just kept coming and coming until it overwhelmed its prey, dragging it down, further from the light.
“We’re taking some time off,” she said after a moment, when she realized she hadn’t answered him.
Thomas said nothing for so long, Sam dared to finally look up. “You know, when I came home from Vietnam, I thought I was going to be so happy. I was alive. I’d made it. I had a wife to come home to.” He paused, his gaze going to a memory decades in the past. “But that didn’t happen. It was… Things didn’t feel right. At the time, I thought it was because of all the bullshit we had to endure. People calling us baby killers and murderers.” He rubbed his eyes behind his coke-bottle glasses. “But after a while I realized that it wasn’t the public’s problem. It was mine.”
Sam listened intently. There was no public antiwar sentiment to make her feel like this. No, the problem was strictly hers. A problem that defied explanation.
“What did you do?”
“Self-medicated for a long time. Melanie’s mother left me for a while. Was hooked on heroin for a while.”
Sam frowned. “Heroin is some pretty heavy stuff.” She never would have guessed that Thomas had been an addict.
“Started smoking opium while I was in Vietnam. Bunch of us did. And let me tell you, that is a habit that you never quit. Every day I wake up and have to remind myself why I’m not chasing the dragon today.” He paused for a long moment. “And then I woke up one day, no idea where I was or what I’d been doing for the last year. Checked myself into a VA rehab center.”
“Mel’s mom took you back?”
“After a while. Took me a long time to unpack all my shit from the war.” He leaned back in his chair. “So whatever is going on with you or with him, give it time. You just got home. Don’t make any decisions right now because you think things are going to be this way forever.” He hesitated a moment. “If you’re not talking to someone, you should.”
She closed her eyes, unable to find the words she needed. How to explain the fear that threatened to choke her when she even thought about what to say, how to say it?
He shifted, pointing his finger at her. “It feels like it will but it won’t be. This, I promise you.” He stood. “But pretending that everything will get better if you just try harder isn’t the answer, Sammy. Believe me, I tried it. Sometimes, the hardest thing in the world to do is admit that your stuff is too much for you to deal with on your own.”