“I’m sorry you can’t anymore,” she said, her voice filled with thought. “I know how much you loved to fly.”
I just stared up at the perfectly blue sky, trying to not let myself feel too much. I’d been doing that a lot since the accident, like I’d set up a screen over myself that wouldn’t allow all my emotions to drip through and drown me.
“I always meant to ask you to take me flying sometime,” she said. I was surprised when her hand reached up and she linked her fingers with mine, the backs of our hands resting against the wooden planks of the bridge. “I’ve never been in a small plane before.”
With everything in me, I wanted to tell her that I wished I could have taken her flying. But writing it down and showing her would have broken the moment. And an even bigger part of me didn’t want to have to let go of Sam’s hand. Ever.
So instead I just squeezed her hand tighter.
There was a lot about my life that was crappy, now that I couldn’t talk. But if I hadn’t gotten drunk that night, if I hadn’t gotten in that accident, would I have ever had this moment? Lying there in the sun, holding Sam’s hand like time didn’t exist and the real world couldn’t touch us?
Somehow I didn’t think so.
5 hours since… what was that with Sam?
I lay down gingerly on my bed that night. After spending four hours at the lake and not bothering to use sunscreen, not that I ever did, I was pretty fried. Living in the Pacific Northwest, one didn’t get a whole lot of sun exposure. My skin wasn’t used to it.
Having showered and said good-night to my family, each of them signing it to me, I hunkered down into bed, two of my notebooks in one hand, a pen in the other. One was my journal, the other was me and Sam’s notebook.
I smiled, recalling the events of the day as I flipped through the pages of the red notebook. Me and Sam’s handwriting alternated throughout the pages, her handwriting neat and careful, mine always rushed and messy.
I was about to set it aside when I noticed some writing at the very end of the notebook, upside down. Folding back the back cover, I flipped it over. It was an entire page of Sam’s handwriting.
I saw that you left your notebook at the end of class today. I put it in my bag and meant to give it to you after school, but I didn’t see you. I figured you’d already left.
Sitting here by myself at home sucks. Mom’s out of town again, as usual, for work. She’s gone more than she is at home these days. You never expect you’ll miss your parent until they’re gone all the time. Do you think you’d miss your mom if she were always away? I bet you would. Your mom’s got such a big personality, she’d leave a big hole if she was gone.
I keep thinking that maybe I should have kept up with sports this year. I see you, and know how badly you still want to be playing football, but can’t anymore, and I feel bad that I’m not doing it when I could. School just feels so overwhelming this year, I don’t think I could keep up with it all.
Jake, I’m really sorry about what happened to you. It’s awful. But… don’t hate me for saying this, okay? Maybe I shouldn’t. What the heck, if I change my mind I guess I can just rip this page out and throw it away. You’ll never have to see it. But… I’m kind of glad it did happen. There are not a whole lot of people I feel like I can talk to lately. Things have… changed for me recently. But I feel like I can talk to you, Jake. You listen, and I feel like you actually see me for more than just the super smart girl at school.
Thanks for being my friend, Jake. I really need you.
I re-read the entire page three times, feeling like I couldn’t entirely absorb everything she had said. A small knot formed in my chest as I read Sam’s words.
Samantha was so alone.
I’d seen it happening since the beginning of the school year, how she’d been pulling away from her friends. Just earlier today I’d noticed how she seemed so much older. It was kind of scary to see what was happening.
That night I made a resolution. I wasn’t going to let Sam keep slipping into her solitude.
Thanks for returning this. I guess I didn’t even realize I’d left it. My mind feels so distracted every day after every class, trying to think of how to take the least crowded ways to class, so the least amount of people will stare at the hole in my neck. Sometimes it feels like it has a beacon in it, flashing for the entire world to see, except it’s not cool like the Bat signal.
I’m sorry your mom is gone so much these days. That must be hard, being home by yourself all the time. I’ve always thought it would be nice to have the house to myself for a while. This place gets so loud all the time and there are always so many people in it. But I guess I’m grateful for all the noise and chaos. I don’t know if I want to be alone in the quiet with my thoughts these days.
Until just now, I haven’t realized how everyone at school except you doesn’t get it, how crappy this is. Carter and Rain just joke about my not being able to talk. I go along with it, but honestly, I wish they’d lay off a bit. They’re just making it worse. Like they won’t ever let me forget what happened. They’re good guys and my best friends but…
So I’m grateful that with how bad everything’s been, you’ve been the way you have. I think I need you too, Sam.
My chest was pounding as I wrote the letters. I fought with myself for a full five minutes, debating if I should just rip the page out and pretend I never wrote any of it. Pretend that I’d never seen Sam’s note either. I could just throw the entire notebook away, pretend I lost it, and force everything to go back to the way it was.
That seemed the least dangerous thing to do.
But I kind of wanted a little risk. I wanted to see what was down the end of this tunnel.
The tunnel eventually had to lead to light, right?
2 days since whatever that was…
The weekend was agonizing, even though there was only Sunday left until I could go back to school on Monday. I’d never been as eager to go back to school as I had been when Monday finally rolled around. I parked my car in the parking lot and Jordan bounded away to join her friends. I walked through the halls, my heart hammering in my throat as I made my way to Sam’s locker.
To my relief and panic, she was standing there, digging through something at the bottom of her locker. Picking up my pace, I slipped the notebook onto the top shelf, reaching over her. I glanced back just once as I walked away, her eyes catching mine. She looked up to see the spiraled pages sticking just over the ledge of the shelf. She glanced back at me, a smile spreading on her face.
I couldn’t help but smile too as I turned my head back in the direction I was walking and made my way to Calculus.
My good mood was brought down a bit when Sam returned the notebook during Physics and she had only drawn a smiley face. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.
Nothing seemed different between the two of us for a few weeks after that day at the lake and after I read her note. We were friends. I was sure about that. But she never tried to hold my hand again, not that I had really expected her to.
It was stupid of me, and I never should have done it, but one day, before I slipped our notebook into Sam’s backpack, I wrote: Do you really not believe in love?
I really wished I never would have asked.
No, she had written back. I believe people become infatuated; maybe they even really like each other. But I don’t believe in love. Those kinds of feelings just don’t last. You feel them for a while, maybe even a few years, but eventually the feeling goes away.
That’s what happened to my parents.
My mom was only nineteen when she met Mike and “fell in love” with him. He was only twenty. They were head over heels and my dad “wanted to give her everything in the world.” I guess they were happy for a year or so. Happy enough to decide to have a kid.
And eventually that man called my “dad” stopped loving my mom, stopped loving me. Maybe love is real, cause he sure loved his alcohol. He stopped coming home, stopped being around. And f
inally he just left. I haven’t seen him since I was six.
If a man can’t love his own offspring, what can anyone love?
So my mom and I did what we had to do. We changed our last names to her maiden name after the divorce finalized, and we moved on with our lives.
Love doesn’t last. It’s a fantasy.
That crushed me. Any hope, any fantasy I’d ever had about telling Sam how I felt, about the slim possibility of her ever feeling the same, was demolished.
7 months ‘til graduation
I was thankful for the distraction of basketball drills. Practice had been underway for two weeks and our first game was going to be a week from Friday. I had started feeling just a little off a week and a half before the game, but I was brushing it off as nothing more than a cold. Sam kept asking me if I felt okay and I always told her I was. But by Wednesday I had a fever of 105 and I was feeling so out of it that I didn’t even realize Mom had loaded me into the van and we were at the ferry landing.
I was headed back to Seattle Children’s Hospital.
The aches I had brushed off as just being sore from working out so much made me curl into a ball on the seat and groan in pain. My clothes stuck to my skin I was sweating so bad. Everything in my body hurt.
With the ferry ride and the drive from Anacortes to Seattle, it was about three hours of travel. But it felt like days until we pulled into the hospital. Mom put her arm under me and helped me walk through the doors of the emergency room. My feet felt like lead and my body screamed in pain as I moved.
Dr. Calvin was waiting for us when we walked through the doors. I didn’t even remember going from the doors into a hospital bed. They started hooking tubes up to my arm, taking my temperature, and all those other kinds of things doctors did.
It didn’t take long for the lights to go out.
I had gotten an infection. Due to my weakened immune system, some small virus had gotten inside of me, getting into my bloodstream and embedding itself in my lungs and snaking out into the rest of my body. No wonder it started getting so hard to breathe during practice and whenever I got too close to Samantha.
They put me on antibiotics, but it was going to take nearly a week for my system to recover.
Dr. Calvin said if I hadn’t been pushing myself so hard at basketball practice I wouldn’t have gotten so bad. He ordered me to sit out the rest of the season.
That was it for sports for me for the rest of my high school life.
I started blocking it all out, shutting down as the days in the hospital rolled by. No one came to visit that time, being too in the middle of things and too busy with life. I was glad they didn’t. I just wanted to be alone and zone out the entire world.
Seven days before Thanksgiving I was finally released. Mom had been given a handful of prescriptions for me, had been the only one that paid enough attention to know what to do with them. My psychologist had come to visit three times since I was readmitted. I didn’t say much, just the things I knew I would need to say to not be kept there longer for psychological evaluation.
I went straight to my room when we got home and didn’t talk to a single one of my brothers or sisters.
It felt like this was never going to end. The world wasn’t going to stop crashing down until there was nothing left of me but dust.
Nothing to look forward to…
Something snapped inside of me after my last hospital visit. That screen I’d placed over my head disappeared and I let myself drown. I let myself wallow, let me feel sorry for myself, let me hate myself. I let myself hate Carter for crashing the truck, hated Rain for convincing me to go tell Sam I loved her that night. Let myself hate Sam for the fact that I did love her.
Everyone backed off those slow two days of school before Thanksgiving break. Carter and Rain ignored me after the first day. River had even tried talking to me once, but I didn’t think I’d even responded to her. Sam kept trying to persist, to tell me things weren’t that bad. But I didn’t listen to her.
How could life be worse?
I sat across from Sam during our ASL class, staring off into nothing. She was pretending I was listening, showing me some new sign we hadn’t gone over before. Our red notebook sat between us, untouched for nearly two weeks. I was thinking about how if we hadn’t all gotten caught for drinking the night of my accident, if the accident never would have happened, the football team might have had the chance to be playing at state that weekend.
If my body didn’t have the weakness of a five-year-old, I would still be able to play on the basketball team.
“Jake!” Sam finally yelled. “Did you lose your ability to hear too?”
My eyes suddenly jumped to her face. I’d never heard Sam sound so mad and she’d only spoken a single sentence.
“What is wrong with you?” she demanded, her eyes blazing. She looked pissed. “You’ve been acting like a total douche since you got out of the hospital. I understand life kind of sucks for you right now, but you need to get over yourself and stop feeling so sorry for yourself.”
My insides hardened as I glared at her.
You don’t say stuff like that to people like me.
I just grabbed my stuff, shoved it back into my backpack and walked out of the room. I stalked through the silent, empty halls, straight out the front doors and into my car. I threw my backpack into the back seat, my books exploding out of it. Slamming the door behind me, I started the car and went peeling out of the parking lot.
Not having anywhere in mind that I wanted to go, I just drove. The slow speeds pissed me off as I went down the narrow winding roads. Forty just wasn’t fast enough. I tore passed the Corner Store, rocketed past the lake in Moran State Park. Soon I was passing Café Olga and the Doe Bay resort. I pulled off onto a dirt road. I didn’t care that I was trespassing on private property. I lucked out, the dirt driveway dead ended just before the water, at an empty lot. The land sloped toward the water before breaking away to the ocean.
I climbed out of the car, leaving the keys in the off position in the ignition, and walked out to the dock that stretched out over the water.
Fall had returned in full force, the sky cloudy, mist sitting on the top of the ocean water. Off in the distance I could just make out the other islands that blocked the view to the mainland.
I wanted to scream as I stood there, my toes hanging over the edge of the dock. I wanted to let a gut wrenching howl rip from my disfigured throat toward those clouded skies. I wanted to say every swear word my mother had ever taught me not to say.
I would have settled for a cut off whimper, just as long as some kind of sound came from my lips.
I sank to my knees, my pants instantly growing moist from the dock. I fell forward onto my palms and eventually sank my forehead to my knees, clutching my hair with enough force I was surprised I wasn’t ripping it out.
Tomorrow was Thanksgiving. Tomorrow my Hayes grandparents would come up from Tacoma, my dad’s sister, Aunt Tally would bring her three kids. Our house would be filled with the scent of a million dishes, we’d all sit around our gigantic dining table, and before we’d eat we’d each say just one thing we were grateful for.
Sitting there on that dock by myself, I didn’t feel like I had anything to be grateful for that year. Or ever.
Still nothing…
Will there ever be anything ever again…?
I didn’t go home until after eleven that night. My parents were totally freaking out, on the verge of calling the police to come look for me. Dad really ripped me a new one. I had just stood there emptily and taken it.
Thanksgiving morning dawned gray and dark, threatening to rain at any moment. I just lay on my bed for a long time, looking out the window, not thinking or feeling anything.
The door creaked open and Mom popped her head inside. I could hear the sound of Grandma and Grandpa outside, along with Aunt Tally and the kids.
“Jake?” she said cautiously, not fully coming into the room. “I forgot to grab a few t
hings for dinner tonight, would you mind running down to The Market for me and grabbing them? If not I could send Jordan.”
I sat up, rubbing a hand over my hair that was sticking up in all directions. I shook my head and reached for a notebook.
No, I wrote. I’ll go.
“Thanks sweetie,” she said, her face breaking out into a relieved smile. I was surprised when her eyes suddenly started watering, turning red. Before I could write what’s wrong? she crossed the room and wrapped her arms around me.
“We have a lot to be grateful for this year, Jake,” she said, her voice filled with emotion. “I know it’s hard, but don’t forget that.”
She stepped away from me, a few loose tears rolling down her cheeks. She placed a kiss on my forehead and I tried to return the smile. I didn’t think I managed it though. Mom handed me a list and then walked back out.
I pulled clothes on in a weird slow motion, not really feeling like I was in my body. Someone else’s legs were sliding into those jeans. Someone else was pulling on that jacket and putting on those shoes.
Not even really thinking about it, I slid the window open and climbed through it. I didn’t really feel like seeing everyone at the moment. Closing the window behind me, I crossed the dewy grass to my car.
Island Market was a small grocery store and you couldn’t help running into people you knew there, even on Thanksgiving morning. Or maybe especially on Thanksgiving morning. I ran into Officer Ryan, the police officer who found Carter, Rain, and me after the accident. I ran into Ms. Sue. I even caught a glimpse of Kali from across the store at the checkout, though I didn’t actually talk to him.
I got the things from Mom’s list and loaded them into the backseat of the car. I was just headed out of the parking lot when I saw Sam walking around the corner. By that point it had started to misty rain and no one would be walking around without an umbrella, but for some reason Sam was, her hair growing damp.