Guilt spikes within me. Are there no limits to the pain I cause this man? Whether I intend to or not, I hurt Sam. Over and over and over again.
My tone is laced with every ounce of the sincerity I feel. “I’m sorry I worried you. I would never hurt you on purpose.”
Not so long ago, he was telling me that very thing in the stairwell of the hospital as his wife laid three floors above us, dying. So much has happened since then. It seems eons ago.
“That’s not true. You will. You’re going to.”
A stab through my sternum.
He’s right.
I will.
“I never meant to. This was never my intention. I didn’t expect to find you again. Not like this. Not this way.”
“But you did.” Sam leans back and catches my eye before I can look away. I fall headlong into the turbulent gray sea of his gaze. There is raw, honest vulnerability in it. He’s letting me see everything. Bare, naked everything. “You found me again and I found you. After all this time, we got a second chance. How could you just waste it? How could you waste us?”
“I’m not wasting anything, Sam. I’m saving you. From me. I’m broken. Broken beyond repair. There is no hope for me. It died a long time ago.”
“That’s such bullshit,” he growls, his fingers digging into my waist. “I’m your hope, Abi. Hope in me. I’ll carry you when you can’t walk. I’ll hold you when you can’t sleep. I’ll be everything you need, and you’ll be everything I need. Most people don’t get second chances like this. Don’t throw it away. Don’t throw me away.”
His eyes are blazing and dying at the same time, but it’s his last words that scorch all the way through me. Don’t throw me away.
Oh God!
Oh, God!
I feel sick and hopeless and angry and…torn. Sam makes me feel torn about the only thing I’ve been certain of in years. Although it scares me half to death, Sam makes me want to live. Or at least try. To give it one more shot and try to do it better this time.
But what if I fail?
What if I screw this up as badly as I’ve screwed up everything else?
I’ll be hurting more people I love. And maybe hurting them worse than if I just took my leave of this earth the way I’ve been planning.
It’s a risk.
And it’s a risk I can’t take.
Not without some assurance that I’m doing the right thing. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my thirty-five years it’s that there are no assurances. Life just doesn’t work that way.
“Sam, I—”
Firm, familiar lips cut off my words. It doesn’t begin as a kiss. It begins as Sam simply holding my mouth closed with his own, like he’s trying to smother what I was about to say.
Without taking his lips from mine, he reaches up to hold my face in his hands, keeping me still, and he speaks against me. “Don’t say no, Abi. Please.” Seconds pass and his mouth softens over mine, melting me, melting my resistance, melting my defenses. “I love you. Can’t that be enough?”
I love you.
A small part of me screams “no”, but the rest of me, the heart and soul of me, shouts “yes”.
My lips part as his do, and the words leave his mouth to flood my own. We sway and we cling and we breathe each other’s air.
And then there’s a shift. The shift as Sam’s lips begin to move in a different way, a way that’s as emotional and painful as it is exquisite and familiar.
He drags his mouth back and forth over mine, lips lazy and soft, tongue flickering out to taste me. He kisses and licks and mumbles all at once, a barrage of sensory input that has my knees dissolving beneath me. “I love you, Abi Simmons. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t go. I can’t let you go again. I can’t do it. Please. Please. Please.”
His pleas fade as his mouth starts to devour mine in earnest, like he’s resisted his greatest addiction until this very moment, and there is no more resistance left in him.
Or maybe that’s only how I feel.
Sam is my drug. He is my addiction. He is the only thing stronger than the pain I feel. But my love for him is the only thing stronger than he is.
And my love vows to protect him. Even if it means breaking him to do it.
The salt of my tears mingles with the sweet taste of his tongue and the residual tang of my drink. My torment leaks freely from my eyes even as my body and my heart rejoice at his words, his kiss, his love. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Since he first gave it to me, losing it has been one of the greatest agonies of my life. And I’ve had plenty. Only one compares to it.
Killing my child.
The loss of Sasha nearly destroyed me. I know the loss of Sam will finish the job. After that, all that will remain is a shell, the shell that I will give to the lake for safekeeping.
A voice pierces the haze of my emotions like a dart through a balloon. “Ma’am, is this your phone? You dropped it on the floor.”
“Pardon?” I’m still fuzzy, but for a totally different reason now.
I frown at the waitress before I glance at what she’s holding. Sure enough, it’s my phone. I don’t even remember holding it. But that’s what Sam does to me. He eclipses everything else.
“Oh, yes, it’s mine. Thank you.” She nods and smiles, and my phone lights up with a missed call before she can even walk away. My heart skips a beat when I see the identification displayed there. Serenity Gardens. They rarely ever call me, but especially not after I’ve just left there.
Every thud of my pulse is like the warning beat of a native drum signaling impending doom. I have no reason to think so, no reason to believe so, but I feel it nonetheless. Something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong.
Having missed the call, I step away from Sam and hit redial, hurrying across the floor and out the door, away from the music. Outside, I hear the receptionist answer, so I ask for Momma’s nurse and I’m immediately put on hold. The next person to pick up isn’t Sherry. I don’t know who she is, and she doesn’t identify herself. She only asks my name.
“Mrs. Jordan?”
I hate being called by my married name, but I haven’t changed my information in the Serenity Gardens files yet, so I just go with it.
“Yes. I’m Marlene Simmons’s daughter. Is everything okay? I just missed a call from there and my mother was—”
“Your mother has had what we believe to be a massive heart attack, Mrs. Jordan. She went into cardiac arrest and she’s just been transferred to the hospital.”
“A heart…cardiac arrest?” A crushing weight descends upon my head, my shoulders, my chest, like I’m sharing in my mother’s fate. “Is she…is she okay? Was she conscious? Will she be all right?”
As a nurse, I know these are questions she can’t answer, but I’m not an ex-medical professional at the moment. Right now, I’m the daughter of a patient. I’m a person in desperate need of reassurance. I’m a woman who has to know if the last solid, stable part of her life is gone.
“I can’t say for sure, of course. She was resuscitated here, and then the squad took her over to the E.R. I’m sure they’ll do everything they can to help her.”
“But she was conscious when she left there?”
The voice of this stranger drops into a tone I’ve heard too many times, a tone I know all too well. “No, ma’am. She had not regained consciousness.”
I bend over, the world swimming around me, the gravity of this news breaking me in half. “I…I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I whisper, my breath coming in short pants as I fend off hysteria.
I hang up and move to the side of the building. I need something to lean on. I need…something.
Everything is falling apart. I had a plan and I was the only one who would get hurt, even though it would only hurt for a moment. But now it’s disintegrating, crumbling to pieces around me—my plan, my heart, my world.
Sadness stings. Panic grips. Despair threatens.
But I force myself to straighten.
; I can’t afford to give in to this right now. I can’t fall apart. Not yet. I have to drive back to my mother. I have to get to her.
“Abi, what is it?”
Sam.
I don’t turn to face him. His voice, his presence, his concern…they’re almost enough to buckle my knees. Oh, how tempting it is to give in, to let him love me and care for me, to let him help me carry the load.
“My-my mother. She…she coded. She’s in the E.R. I have to go to her.”
I turn and push past him without even looking up. I know what I’ll see in his expression, and I can’t take it right now.
Fingers clamp down on my upper arm like steel vices, stopping me in my tracks. “You’re not driving anywhere like this. You’ve been drinking. I’ll take you.”
Still I don’t turn to him. I can’t. I won’t.
“I’ll be fine, Sam. Let me go.”
“The hell I will, Abi! I love you. I’m not letting you get behind the wheel to kill yourself a different way.”
“I won’t. I’m okay to drive. I just need to get to my mother. Let me go, Sam.”
“You say that because you think it’s just your life. Something disposable. But what about other drivers? What if you wrecked and hit a bus full of kids or a woman with her new baby? You’re willing to risk your own life. I get that loud and clear. But what about someone else’s? Are you willing to take that risk just to leave me behind?”
Sam knows me too well. Still. After all this time. He knows exactly what to say and where to press. My ability to stay strong, to resist, to be stubborn is nearly nonexistent in the face of his persistence.
I give in. Sam is right. Again. I’m upset and between the alcohol and my emotional distress, I’m not thinking straight. If I were, I would never even consider taking such a chance. “Fine. But what about Noelle? Don’t you need to get home?”
Sam reaches for my other arm and pulls me around to face him, giving me no other choice. “She’s with my parents. Remember?”
“Oh, right.” I give my head a shake. “But Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“After this, please let me go.”
His expression is as soft as mountain heather and as tender as a newborn’s skin. “I can’t do that, Abi. I’ve tried.”
“Try again.”
“I’ll think about it on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You think about trying again, too. With me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can, you just won’t. There’s a difference.”
“Can’t you see I’m trying to protect you?”
“Can’t you see I’m trying to protect me, too? My life is better with you in it. And yours can be better with me in it. Just give it a chance.”
I sigh in exasperation. My defenses are low and I want with all my heart to say yes. “Can we talk about this later?”
Sam’s mouth opens like he’s about to say something, but in the end, he only nods, sliding his hands down my arms to lace his fingers with mine. He brings them to his mouth, kissing my knuckles then whispering over the tops of them. “Later. Yes. I’ll take later. Later gives me hope. Now let’s go see your mom.”
Sam leads me down the sidewalk to his truck, one palm pressed tightly to mine, and all I can think about is the flicker of hope I saw come to life in his eyes.
Later.
And how seeing it made me feel.
CHAPTER 32
ABI
All That Remains
I sit in the hard, cold emergency department chair. They pulled it up right beside my mother’s body so I could hold her cooling hand. I rub each of her thin fingers, one after the other, over and over, rinse and repeat. A well of tears is filling up in the bottom of my heart, but none of them are spilling out. It’s as though my tear ducts are seared shut. Maybe I’ve cried my last tear. Or maybe I’m simply too stunned, too devastated to process this enough to cry yet.
When we arrived, I knew by the look on the nurse’s face when she came to get me from the waiting room that I was too late. Sam came back with me, saw my mother’s lifeless body covered with a plain white sheet that stretched all the way to the chin, and he pulled me into his arms. I could feel the sympathy, the shared agony rolling off him in warm thick waves that cloaked me in a strength I didn’t feel until he touched me.
“I’m so sorry, Abi. I’m so, so sorry.” He murmured sweet things into my hair and I clung to him. Embarrassingly so, especially for a public place. For a few minutes, I couldn’t bring myself to let him go. I guess that’s always been my problem when it comes to Sam—letting go.
But finally, as though sensing my need for space, he unwrapped me from his arms and cupped my face. He kissed me softly on the lips then backed away to move toward the door. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”
I nodded once and took the chair they’d provided next to my mother. I haven’t budged since. I have no idea how long ago that was.
I know I need to say goodbye, but I don’t know how. The events of the day, of the past months and years, play through my mind in a barrage of feelings that I can’t even make sense of. It’s like trying to find my way out of a briar patch when everything I touch pricks me and makes me bleed.
Carefully, as I stroke my mother’s fingers, I pick my way through the thicket until I can separate the good memories from the bad, and I pull those out, one by one.
“Do you remember that time you and Daddy took me to the carnival and I ate so much cotton candy my lips were blue for a week?”
I laugh, which is strange. That memory, for whatever reason, gives me great pleasure, though. Every time she and Daddy would look at me, they’d smile and shake their heads. We couldn’t figure out how to get that blue off. Turns out, it just took time and a lot of scrubbing.
“That was the best day.”
As if that one event triggers a release of some sort, other shared memories follow until everything is pouring out. All the things I haven’t been able to say to my mother over the last years because she had the mind of a child tumble from my lips in one long, uninterrupted purge. I tell her about Greg and I tell her about Sasha. I tell her about my leg and I tell her about coming back to Molly’s Knob. I tell her about Sam and Sara and Noelle, and I tell her how much I fell in love with them, even though I already loved Sam. I tell her that he was the love of my life, like I always knew he was.
“You were wrong, Momma. All those nights I cried myself to sleep when we first moved, the nights when you promised me I’d get over him, you were wrong. You said the pain eventually goes away, but that wasn’t true. It didn’t go away for you, and it’s never gone away for me either. Real love doesn’t just disappear. But I wish it did. I wish I could walk away from him, for his own good. But I can’t. I want to tell him I love him, that I always have, but if I tell him that, I’ll only hurt him again, and I can’t do that to him. Not now. Not after all that’s happened. You understand, Momma, don’t you?”
She doesn’t respond, of course. Even if she were alive, she wouldn’t respond. She would have no idea she ever knew the boy I’m talking about. In a way, my mother was all alone. In her mind, she had no one. Just nurses and orderlies and a woman who came to do her hair. Them and a veritable stranger who visited periodically, and brought her toys and gifts and occasionally called her Momma by accident.
Now I am all alone, too. I am all that remains. Everyone I had in the world is gone. My mother, my father, my child, and, for all intents and purposes, Sam. Although I could have a family again, I could have love again, it would be strained. It would be temporary. It would be a love tainted by the shadow of time, ticking away toward a painful, grotesque end. And it would end. Badly, and with nothing but pain for them. What kind of person would do that? What kind of person would subject someone else to that?
An awful one.
And I can’t be that person.
For me there is no hope.
Even as I feel the tug of the bla
ck hole, sucking me closer and closer to the oblivion it offers, Sam’s words play through my mind. They argue a different perspective, a different alternative.
I’m your hope, Abi. Hope in me.
I bow my head and press my eyes to the back of my mother’s hand. “If you could just tell me what to do, Momma. Just one more time. I need you.”
The tightness in my throat, my chest, my very soul, is nearly unbearable. I know she won’t help me. She can’t. She hasn’t been able to in a long, long time. But that doesn’t stop me from needing it so desperately.
A throat clears behind me, but I don’t raise my head. “Ma’am, the funeral home is here to get her. Would you mind signing for her belongings?”
I raise my head, but don’t look away from Momma’s face. It’s relaxed, calm, finally at peace. Although my heart is breaking for the millionth time, I’m glad for her sake that she’s not suffering anymore. Whether she knew it or not, her heart was broken, too. But not anymore. She’s with Daddy and her parents. And Sara. Maybe she will meet her and they can talk about me until I get there.
If I get there.
That old worry, the one that’s plagued me since I decided to take my own life, bubbles up, as do the questions. What if I don’t make it to heaven? Will God forgive the taking of one’s own life? Will He consider the circumstances or will they make no difference?
Anger boils beneath my skin, as it always does. I feel like a woman with no options and no answers. No help. No hope. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bitter, because I am. And I have been for many years. From the moment I left Sam, all the way up until Sasha was born, I was bitter. I had a brief reprieve during the short span of my daughter’s life, but with her death returned the bitterness, full force. From there, it only got worse.
Now, here I am with nothing and no one. And no hope of anything else.
The nurse returns with a bag and a piece of paper on a clipboard. I sign where she tells me to, and I take the bag she offers. Moments later, two men come into the room. I watch with stinging yet dry eyes as they transfer my mother onto a different kind of stretcher and zip her body up in a velvet bag the color of old blood. Each man nods as they wheel her past me, as they take her out of my life forever.