“Good morning, Sammy-Sam!” her father bellowed. “This is Russell T. Quinn, at your service. It is currently forty-three degrees, with winds coming out of the southwest at two miles per hour. Humidity is at thirty-nine percent. Barometric pressure is holding at thirty.” Sam shook her head in bewilderment. “I am calling you today, the very same day that, in 1536, Anne Boleyn was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, to remind you, my dear Samantha, to not lose your head on your forty-fourth birthday.” He laughed, because he always laughed at his own cleverness. Sam waited for the sign-off. “‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’”
Sam smiled. She was about to delete the voicemail when, uncharacteristically, Rusty added something new.
“Your sister sends her love.”
Sam felt her brow furrow. She scrubbed back the voicemail to listen to the last part again.
“… a bear,” Rusty said, then after a short pause, “Your sister sends her love.”
Sam doubted very seriously that Charlie had sent any such thing.
The last time she’d talked to Charlie—the last time she had even been in the same room with her—there had been a definite and immediate ending to their relationship, an understanding that there was neither the need nor the desire for either of them to talk to each other ever again.
Charlie had been in her last year at Duke. She had flown to New York to visit Sam and to interview at several white shoe firms. Sam realized at the time that her sister was not visiting her so much as treating Sam’s apartment as a free place to stay in one of the most expensive cities on earth, but almost a decade had passed since she’d seen her little sister, and Sam had been looking forward to the two of them reacquainting as adults.
The first shock of the trip was not that Charlie had brought a strange man with her, but that the strange man was her husband. Charlie had dated Ben Bernard for less than a month before legally binding herself to someone about whom she knew absolutely nothing. The decision was irresponsible and dangerous, and but for the fact that Ben was one of the most kind, most decent human beings on the planet—not to mention that he was clearly head over heels in love with Charlie—Sam would have been livid with her sister for such a stupid, impetuous act.
The second shock was that Charlie had canceled all of her interviews. She had taken the money Sam had sent to buy proper business attire and instead used it to purchase tickets to see Prince at Madison Square Garden.
This brought about the third, most fatal shock.
Charlie was planning to work with Rusty.
She had insisted that she would only be in the same building with their father, not involved in Rusty’s actual practice, but to Sam, the distinction held no difference.
Rusty took risks at work that followed him home. The people who were in his office, in the office that Charlie would soon share, were the kinds of people who burned down your house, who went to your home looking for you, and when they found out you weren’t there, murdered your mother and shot your sister and chased you through the woods with a shotgun because they wanted to rape you.
The final altercation between Sam and Charlie had not taken place immediately. They had argued in fits and starts for three long days in Charlie’s planned five-day visit.
Then on the fourth day, Sam had finally exploded.
She had always had a slow-boiling temper. It’s what had made her lash out at Zachariah Culpepper in the kitchen while her mother was lying dead a few feet away, her sister was covered in urine, and a blood-smeared shotgun was pointed directly at her face.
Subsequent to her brain injury, Sam’s temper had become almost unmanageable. There were countless studies that showed how certain types of damage to the frontal and temporal lobes could lead to impulsive, even violent, anger, but the ferocity of Sam’s rage beggared scientific explanation.
She had never hit anyone, which was a piteous victory, but she threw things, broke things, attacked even cherished objects as if she were ruled by insanity. The physical acts of destruction paled in comparison to the damage rendered by her sharp tongue. The fury would take hold, Sam’s mouth would open, and hate would spew like acid.
Now, the meditation helped smooth out her emotions.
The laps in the pool helped re-direct her anxiety into something positive.
Back then, nothing had been able to stop Sam’s venomous rage.
Charlie was spoiled. She was selfish. She was a child. She was a whore. She wanted to please her father too much. She had never loved Gamma. She had never loved Sam. She was the reason they had all been in the kitchen. She was the reason Gamma had been murdered. She had left Sam to die. She had run away then, just like she was going to run away now.
That last part, at least, had proven to be true.
Charlie and Ben had returned to Durham in the middle of the night. They had not even stopped to pack their few belongings.
Sam had apologized. Of course she had apologized. Students didn’t have voicemail or email back then, so Sam had sent a certified letter to Charlie’s off-campus apartment along with the carefully packed box of things they had left in New York.
Writing the letter was without question the hardest thing that Sam had ever done in her life. She had told her sister that she loved her, had always loved her, that she was special, that their relationship meant something. That Gamma had adored her, had cherished her. That Sam understood that Rusty needed Charlie. That Charlie needed to be needed by their father. That Charlie deserved to be happy, to enjoy her marriage, to have children—lots of children. That she was old enough to make her own decisions. That everyone was so proud of her, happy for her. That Sam would do anything if Charlie would forgive her.
“Please,” Sam had written at the end of the letter. “You have to believe me. The only thing that got me through months of agony, years of recovery, a lifetime of chronic pain, is the fact that my sacrifice, and even Gamma’s sacrifice, gave you the chance to run to safety.”
Six weeks had passed before Sam had received a letter in return.
Charlie’s response had been a single, honest, compound complex sentence. “I love you, I know that you love me, but every time we see each other, we see what happened, and neither one of us will ever move forward if we are always looking back.”
Her little sister was a lot smarter than Sam had ever given her credit for.
Sam took off her glasses. She gently rubbed her eyes. The scars on her eyelids felt like Braille beneath her fingertips. For all of her complaints about superficial, she worked very hard to mask her injuries. Not because she was embarrassed, but because other people were curious. There was no more effective conversation stopper than the words, “I was shot in the head.”
Make-up covered the pink ridges where her eyelids had been torn. A three-hundred-dollar haircut covered the scar on the side of her head. She tended to dress in flowy black pants and shirts to help camouflage any hesitation in
her gait. When she spoke, she spoke clearly, and when exhaustion threatened to loosen her hold on language, she kept her own counsel. There were days that Sam needed a cane to walk, but over the years, she had learned that the only reward for physical hard work was more physical hard work. If she was late at the office and she wanted a car to take her the six blocks home, she took the car.
Today, she walked the six blocks to work with relative ease. In honor of her birthday, she’d worn a colorful scarf to brighten up her usual black. As she took a left onto Wall Street, a strong gust of wind barreled off the East River. The scarf flew behind her like a cape. Sam laughed as she tangled with the silk scarf. She wrapped it around her neck and held loosely onto the ends as she walked through her new neighborhood.
Sam had not been a resident of the area for long, but she had always loved the history, that Wall Street had been, in fact, an earthen wall meant to secure the northern boundary of New Amsterdam; that Pearl Street and Beaver Street and Stone Street were named after the wares that Dutch traders sold along the muddy lanes that spoked out from where tall, wooden sailing boats had once docked.
Seventeen years ago, when Sam had first moved to New York, she’d had her choice of law firms. In the world of patent law, her Stanford master’s in mechanical engineering carried significantly more weight than her master’s from Northwestern Law. Sam had passed both the New York bar and the patent bar on her first attempts. She was a woman in a male-dominated field that desperately needed diversity. The firms’ proffers had practically been extended on bended knee.
She had joined the first firm whose signing bonus was enough to cover the down payment on a condo in a building with an elevator and a heated pool.
The building was in Chelsea, a lovely pre-war mid-rise with high ceilings and a swimming pool in the basement that looked like a Victorian-era natatorium. Despite the rapid improvement of Sam’s finances over the years, she had happily lived in the cramped, two-bedroom apartment until her husband had died.