“Why did you shut me out?” I asked, my voice quiet.
He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, clearly struggling. The world suspended itself around us. Cars rushed by us, yet their headlights seemed to hold us still as a held breath. My whole life was in this timeless minute, because I was about to hear the explanation for the unexplainable four and a half years later.
“I’ve thought about that a lot, Amy. I don’t have an easy answer,” he said.
I wanted to interrupt him but I kept my mouth shut. He needed to tell me this, and it needed to be one-hundred percent on him. I had tortured myself over the years, trying to guess how I was somehow responsible for what Sam had done. No matter how hard my insecure, unworthy self tried to turn this around into a blame that I could place on me, though, I couldn’t. It was all him.
“When you won,” he said, slowly, “you won.” He tipped my head up to look me in the eye—he was a head taller. “You won decisively.” He shook his head. “I never had any question, and you were fine up there, on your game.”
“So were you,” I interrupted, breaking my own vow.
“But you were better,” he said, simply. “I had a lot riding on that debate.”
“We all did,” I said.
A pained expression covered his face. “There’s so much more to this than I think I can explain right now, but please let me say what I can say,” he stressed.
I nodded. Our legs began to walk in concert, left and left, right and right. “OK,” that was all I could think to say.
“My dad,” he said, the words coming out bitterly, “told me that at all costs, I needed to make it into the top three. And if I didn’t, I was a worthless piece of shit.”
I felt slapped, imagining the pain of his father saying that and taking it on myself. It hurt me to think that someone would hurt him like that. “Oh, Sam,” I whispered.
“Let me finish,” he said, holding out one hand, palm to me, his voice shaky, “because if I don’t finish, I don’t think I can do this.”
“This?”
“Oh, I can do this,” he stressed, stroking my hip and my ribcage with one hand, making me hot and needy, and wanting so much more. “But Amy,” he said, plaintively, stopping and turning toward me, his hands on my shoulders, his eyes serious. “What I need to do first is this; I need to tell you what happened, or at least part of it.” He sighed, his words taking on a gravitas that made time move slower. “My dad told me I had to win, and I had to win in order to get the debate scholarship to one of my top three. If I didn’t, it was Bible school. And that was it. So, you won and I left, knowing what I was about to go home to.”
“And what did you go home to?”
His face hardened and he closed off.
I could hear thousands of words in his silence, all of them thorned and barbed. I didn’t want to put him through reliving that, so I didn’t press. Not yet. Someday, when he was comfortable, he would tell me, and I would hold him, and I would help him, and we would be OK. Now was too soon. It was too much.
I reached up and kissed him gently on the lips, standing on tiptoe. “You don’t have to do this all right now, Sam.”
“I know.” His words hung in the air.
We continued walking, both eager to see what came next. “But I want you to understand that I was...stupid. There’s really no other word for it. I got home, uh...the world ended with my dad—that’s the easiest way to put it—and I just froze. Everything changed, I had to scramble to survive, and I became someone else because I had to.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He ran a hand through his hair, his jaw clenched, his body tight and restrained. “Amy...I just...” he stumbled. “Can we leave it at that? Can we just say that it’s like I disappeared and a different Sam—let’s call him Robot Sam—kicked in and everything was about functioning, and nothing was about emotion. It was easier to shut everything out, because I learned a hard lesson that day at home.”
“What lesson?” I whispered.
“There’s no such thing as unconditional love.”
I closed my eyes. The thorned and barbed words were as I had expected. What I wanted to say, what pushed against my lips so hard to come out, and yet, remained behind my teeth was—
Let me help you unlearn that lesson.
Sam
I was dying, absolutely dying. You would think that having a bunch of emotions inside me, it would be easy to just pick one and explore it. It’s the hardest fucking thing to do in the world. It’s so much easier to shut down, to close off, to protect myself and never look at them at all. I’d done more than ignore my emotional past. I’d put it in a box inside me, and I’d padlocked the box and thrown it and its key in separate oceans. And now, here with Amy, she was asking me to find the key, and the box, and unlock everything
We walked in silence for a long time, the peaceful presence of her enough. Words weren’t needed. Most people fill the space between them and other humans with speech. It clouds everything if words are used like that. Conversations that have meaning, or that teach—that’s different. But chatter for the sake of chatter is like crappy junk food.
It just makes you feel full, and then sick, and then you regret you ever partook.
Amy stopped at a brick building, weirdly angled into not-quite an L shape. She punched a code into the security door and took my hand, fingers entwining as we went in. We walked up a set of stairs, and then another, and were in an apartment the size of a healthy walk-in closet.
“Is this your apartment?” I said. “This is the whole thing?”