Laugh Page 20

  “You’re good at a lot more than you think, Sam.” She caught his eye this time, and her looking at him, saying that, made it so he could breathe.

  “I have bad days, too, is what I’m trying to say. Maybe it’s just sort of shitty, like I pretty much know, one hundred percent, that some guy needs an MRI and I find out their insurance won’t cover it, then I get all backed up yelling at insurance guys. Maybe it’s worse, maybe I lose a patient, and that shit’s awful. You never stop thinking about what you might’ve done different, even if you couldn’t have.”

  “Yeah,” Nina said. She got it. Like always. She always got it.

  He looked at her, and she was crying. Not making noise, but tears were running down her face. Fuck.

  “I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean …”

  She shook her head and wiped her hand under her eyes. He put his hand on her thigh as he turned into the drop-off loop of the hospital.

  “No, Sam. It’s not you. What you said, it helps.” She put her hand over his on her thigh. “It really helped, I’m just …”

  “Was it like a yelling-at-insurance-guys day, or a lost-a-patient day?”

  “Maybe like I gave the patient the wrong medicine and made them a little sicker day.”

  “Fucking sucks, Nina.”

  “Yeah.”

  She opened the door and got out. He waved. He had no idea if anything he’d said had really helped, or what it would mean later, or if he was any closer to her understanding where they were headed.

  He watched her walk up to the double doors, and walk in, an arm around her body. He leaned over and rescued the pie, which had slid to the foot well pie-side-up and looked okay, with just a few pieces of the crust on the edge knocked off. He set it carefully in the passenger seat to share at Betty’s. That way, his family would eat Nina’s pie, have something to talk to her about later.

  He’d check in on her later.

  That’s all he knew how to do. Tell her what he could. Check on her. Because he knew.

  He just knew.

  Chapter Twenty

  “She looks good.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever known her to laugh that much.” PJ took a huge bite of pie off his fork and stretched out his legs over the steps of the back stoop where he was sitting next to Sam.

  “So you think she’s happy?”

  “ ’Course.”

  “Hefin didn’t say very much.”

  “Hefin never says very much.”

  “Did you see, though”—Sam turned to listen to Betty behind them, holding her own piece of pie—“how he looked at her the whole time?”

  “I did,” Sam said. He stood up, so Betty could sit.

  She sat down with a sigh.

  “This is the best pie I think I’ve ever had, Sam. Be sure to thank Nina for me.”

  “I will.”

  “Where’d she go?” PJ asked.

  “She went to see her friend Tay, in the hospital.”

  “The young woman with cancer?” Betty asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, that’s such a shame. Lacey told me about it, how young she is. I hope you’ll keep us posted.”

  Sam felt unsettled in a way that hadn’t bothered him for a while. Talking to Des on Skype, trying to listen to her stories through her laughter, he had felt unsettled. Des had barely been able to get through the stories for laughing; she had kept looking at Hefin to help her finish some story about their hiking in the Lake District or eating dinner at the Tower of London, about his teasing her about her Europe on Fifty Dollars a Day guide and how one night she had spent her money before dinner, so she went to bed early and then woke him up to get fish and chips at midnight, the start of a new day.

  Hefin had just kept grinning at her.

  Sam had been trying to see the room they were in, the world they were in. Wherever she was in the world, he couldn’t see anything but their faces, their grins, their love.

  All he could see was their love.

  And instead of reassuring him, instead of making him feel good about where she was, no matter where she was, it had made him feel unsettled.

  He had fallen in love, too, and yet he wasn’t emanating joy like Des and Hefin were. He had held Nina captive in his Honda not two hours ago, driving her around just so she would stay with him.

  Be near him.

  And they hadn’t laughed or grinned either. He hadn’t felt free to lean over and kiss her cheek like Hefin had done in a moment where it seemed he had forgotten about the webcam. Sam had watched Hefin close his eyes and kiss Des’s cheek, and she had just laughed and kissed his cheek back like it was the easiest thing in the whole goddamned world to do.

  Love was not easy.

  At all.

  “I’m worried about Tay” was what Sam said.

  PJ got up to stand in the yard and lean against the rail of the stoop. Sam sat down next to Betty.

  “Nina’s a widow, and even though she’s been out here for over ten years, I know she misses her family. Maybe she’d like to see them more. But Tay and the rest of the people in her business have become her friends and family.”

  Sam didn’t say more. He didn’t want to say out loud that he was worried if Nina lost Tay, he’d lose Nina. He’d never have a chance at her. The loss would swallow her up and he’d never somehow convince her that he would work hard to make her happy. In as many moments as he could.

  He wanted Tay to be okay so that Nina would be okay, and he knew enough to understand the basic selfishness of that. Because if Nina was okay, she would take a chance on him.

  They would figure it out.

  Really, he would figure it out. He would have time to learn how to listen and to understand better the people he loved. He would find the kind of connection he saw between Des and Hefin.

  He needed time, though, and if Tay didn’t have time, if this was the beginning of the end of her life, then Nina could never find the time to offer him, and he wouldn’t blame her.

  He would continue to love her, but he wouldn’t blame her if she couldn’t love him back.

  He wasn’t given to magical thinking, but he had to believe that if he hadn’t found love like this, love that forced him to reach out and to think, until now, until he was old enough to think he might have missed out—well, then.

  It must be meant to be.

  It must be.

  This must be his chance.

  “You’re worried that someone who is grieving can’t love you?”

  Sam looked at Betty, and his hand tightened around his beer.

  PJ walked out into the yard.

  He was always sensitive to private things.

  And this was private, what Betty had said.

  “Would you rather talk to Daniel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, don’t talk then, just let me tell you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not convinced that what happens in life, the day-to-day, is meant to make us happy. I think what makes us happy is having other people that we love, and we both know how easy it is to lose those people.”

  Betty put down her pie plate and picked up her coffee. Sam had thought, all spring and summer, since she bought his dad’s limo from Des and started driving around people from their church, since she met Daniel and married, since she started gardening, that she looked younger and younger. Like maybe life was backing up for her, giving her another chance to enjoy it.

  “But Sam,” she said, “what else are we meant to do? It’s not so hard, actually, to love people, and it’s not so bad to love someone when you’re missing someone else. I watched my best friend’s kids grow up after I lost my husband, and then I watched you kids grow up more after I lost her and you lost her. What other choice is there?”

  “There are other ways to lose people than dying.”

  “That’s right, but it’s just as true that life doesn’t often give you much choice but to live. The days come, ready or not; you lo
ve someone, ready or not; you find yourself driving to the garden store to make a vacant lot look less ugly. Not something you think about, you just do it.”

  “I’ve gotten in a lot of trouble by not thinking.”

  “True. Though you’re doing alright, Sam. You beat yourself up, but you must be thinking enough to get by.”

  “I’d like to do a little better than get by.”

  “Why? Why should you do a little better than the rest of us?”

  Sam sat next to Betty and finished his beer while the sun moved down behind the houses.

  She stood up and went in, patting him on the shoulder when she went.

  He could hear PJ and Sarah laughing somewhere in the garden next door, the one Betty had made of the vacant lot.

  Sarah had sat next to him on the sofa while they talked to Des, and once, after Des had laughed so hard she snorted, they had looked at each other, and it was the way it had always been between them, comfortable and easy. He had always been the most comfortable with Sarah. Partly because they were closest in age, partly because Sarah just never seemed to mind Sam, at least when they were young.

  She didn’t mind that he was always moving, she preferred to move, too. They learned to ride skateboards together, saved up to go on a skiing trip, had both done track and field at school.

  They’d both broken their wrists, at different times.

  They’d both been close to their mom, in different ways.

  As adults, Des and Sam had become closer, mainly because Des, Sam was realizing, made excuses for him. For his temper, for how he used control to cover up how out of control he felt. Some of that, he and Des had gotten past before she left. A little more, lately, through email.

  Sarah might have given up on him.

  Except that Betty was probably right, because she always was, that most of the time life just offers up another day, and you live it. He’d keep calling Sarah and asking her what she was doing for lunch, and eventually she would have time.

  PJ and Sarah came around the corner. Sarah was managing her crutches well, and Sam could see new muscles in her shoulders, her forearms.

  Those muscles let him breathe.

  They walked up the steps past him.

  Before they went inside, Sarah poked him in the back with her crutch. “Good night, dork.”

  Sam smiled.

  * * *

  Sam found Nina sitting on the steps leading up to her building.

  It was dark, and there were junebugs throwing themselves against the security light over her head. There were so many it sounded like popcorn popping.

  She was still wearing the skirt and top he’d dropped her off at the hospital in, but she had done something to her hair so that it piled on top of her head, heavy and dark, with pieces all around her neck.

  She looked tired and beautiful.

  When he sat next to her, in the harsh security light, he could see a place by her temple where there was a half-inch clump of silver coming in.

  He touched it, smoothed it with his fingertip.

  Thought of her holding grandchildren.

  Wondered if she even wanted children.

  He realized that he didn’t know if he did or not. That he would be okay with whatever Nina wanted, but if he were to have children, it would only be with Nina.

  “You’re here late.”

  “How’s Tay?”

  She turned and smiled at him. “You know, she’s doing good. She’s healing so well her surgeon got her flowers for her room today, like a prize. I think he was just trying to cheer her up, because she’s already impatient.”

  “Her pain’s manageable?”

  “Very, she says. I believe her. She seemed to have a lot of energy.” Nina was quiet, then said, “She’s worried about treatment. The radiation and chemo.”

  “It isn’t easy.”

  “She’s never sick. Never takes sick days, doesn’t even have allergies, and most farmers I know, over time, have at least a few of those from exposure.”

  “Hang on to that, Nina. She will get sick from treatment, but that she’s had a healthy life, entered into this with good health, is young, works for her.”

  “Okay.”

  Sam reached out and traced Nina’s profile, over her forehead, down her nose, over her lips and chin.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It’s okay, I’m sorry I just …”

  “No, I mean it. I’m not an intuitive or sensitive man, Nina. I’m best when I know exactly what to do, and I almost never do. I’m not good at thinking through how someone might react to something I do or say. I struggle with empathy.”

  She looked at him then.

  “I told you that after Russ died, I found out that I was pregnant.”

  “You alluded to that, yes.”

  “I couldn’t have that baby, because I was so sad, so angry, so empty that I was certain I would have nothing to give that baby to grow. I know about how to make things grow, I know what it takes to nurture something so it’s healthy and strong, and I didn’t have those things, not for me, and not for another person. For a person who deserved all the love in the world.”

  Sam took her hand, had to touch her. Her voice was one he hadn’t heard from her before, all in her throat, not from her.

  “I can understand that, Nina. I can.”

  “I know,” Nina said. “I know that you can, and even if you couldn’t, it doesn’t make it less true, it’s not something I can change, and Sam, I don’t regret it. Not the way my family does, they way they want me to.”

  He couldn’t think of what to say, so he didn’t say anything.

  He just sat next to her and held her hand.

  “On a day like today, though,” Nina said, “when the harvest has gone so badly, and my best friend is in the hospital, and I am far away from home, I can’t help but think what my life would be like if Russ had lived.”

  Sam kept sitting, kept holding her hand, but he had to look away.

  Had to.

  “We’d have moved to Seattle like he wanted. Had a kid. No fields, no farms. Jobs that didn’t depend on the weather. We’d have taken our kid to her grandparents’ farm so she understood her roots, but our days wouldn’t be ruled by what might or might not happen a year out, two years out. I don’t know why, even, I think of that baby being a girl. I just do. Maybe because I was a girl, then.”

  “Sounds nice.” Sam closed his eyes, squeezed Nina’s hand.

  “That’s what I think about on a day like this. I think about how nice the weather is in Seattle in the summer. I think about how Russ always loved this divey burrito place there, and maybe we would’ve gone there for dinner on a nice summer day in Seattle after we picked our kid up from school.”

  Nina squeezed his hand back, finally, but Sam still couldn’t open his eyes.

  The worst part was he sat on the bench and he wished that what Nina was saying could be true for her. He could see her laughing with some guy, some nice guy, with a kid with long dark braids, on some city street, getting ready to order burritos.

  He wanted it to be what had happened, for Russ to have come back from war so that he watched Nina get fat with their kid and be a dad. Nina lost that man, and that man lost more than his life, he lost Nina.

  Thinking about him as someone who loved Nina and couldn’t have a whole life with her gave Sam insight into her grief. This was a man who had thought about her, kissed her, made her happy, saw her happy.

  And now he just wanted her to be happy.

  That’s all.

  Which meant that by understanding what Russ had missed out on, Sam could find a place inside him that wondered how Nina had ever moved on. How she got up the next morning, the one after that.

  He’d seen her laugh, and it was a miracle, everything about it.

  He wasn’t a man particularly given to prayer, but he thought about Russ, and thinking about him and what he didn’t get to see and what Nina had moved on fro
m, just thinking about that, well, it felt like a prayer.

  “So that’s why I got out of your car, Sam. Because that’s what I was thinking. And there you were, taking me to your family with a pie, and how you look at me is so beautiful. Even what you asked me, after our date, was beautiful.”

  “I’m sitting here thinking that if I could, I’d give you that. Your life in Seattle. Just like you said.”

  “Sam.”

  “I would. I love you. I know that I’m not supposed to say that yet, that I’m not supposed to feel it, doesn’t make it any less true.”

  He felt her hand on his face, and he turned to look at her. He knew she was crying, had been crying while she talked to him, but it was worse to see the tears.

  She kissed him, and he reached up to slide his hands around her nape.

  Her mouth was soft, her kisses perfect.

  He kissed every part of her mouth, followed her tongue with his, moved to kiss her eyelids and her ears, her jaw and her neck.

  Then their kisses were deeper, and it felt so good. She felt so fucking good; her skin was warm, though he could still make it rough with goose bumps just by running his fingers over her shoulders, her upper arms, by scraping his teeth over her neck.

  She pulled away.

  “Was it good? To see your sister Destiny?”

  “It was.”

  “I’m glad.” Nina leaned back. “I miss my family, Sam.”

  He pulled her close, to sit along his side.

  “When’s the last time you saw them?”

  “I see them a couple times a year. It’s still so hard for them though. To forgive me. To embrace what I’ve done here, the choices that I made. They’re still there, you know. Where Russ grew up. So everywhere they go, they see him. My parents see me and him everywhere they walk all over that place. I know they feel like I’ve denied them something—some measure of comfort, some way to make their pain less. I hurt them, by being here. By living my life.”