Sam hissed out a low, steady stream of breath.
Slowly, she went through her nightly exercises, engaging, then releasing every muscle in her body, from the flexor digitorum brevis in her feet to the galea aponeurotica beneath her scalp.
She waited for her body to relax, for sleep to come, but there was a pronounced lack of cooperation. The silence in the room was too complete. Even Fosco was absent his usual sighs and licks and snores.
Sam’s eyes opened.
She stared up at the ceiling, waited for the darkness to turn to gray, the gray to give way to shadows cast by the tiny edge of light that always sneaked between the blinds on the windows.
“Can you see?” Charlie had asked. “Sam, can you see?”
“Yes,” Sam had lied. She could feel the freshly planted soil beneath her bare feet. Every step away from the farmhouse, away from the light, added one more layer of darkness. Charlie was a blob of gray. Daniel was tall and skinny, like a charcoal pencil. Zachariah Culpepper was a menacing black square of hate.
Sam sat up, swiveled her legs over the side of the bed. She pressed her hands into her thighs, working the stiff muscles. The radiant heat in the floor warmed the soles of her feet.
She could feel her heart beating. Slow and steady. The sinoatrial node, the atrioventricular node, the His-Purkinje network of fibers that sent impulses to the muscular walls of the ventricles, making them alternately contract and relax.
Sam stood up. She went back into the kitchen. She got her reading glasses out of her briefcase. She held her phone in her hand.
She opened the new email from Ben.
Charlie needs you.
8
Sam sat in the back seat of a black Mercedes, clenching and unclenching her hand around her phone as the driver merged onto Interstate 575.
Two decades of progress had done its damage to the North Georgia landscape. Nothing had been left untouched. Shopping centers had sprung up like weeds. Billboards peppered the landscape. Even the once-lush, wildflower-lined medians were gone. A massive, reversible toll lane cut through the center of the interstate, catering to all the pickup-driving John Boys who drove down to Atlanta every day to make money, then drove back at night and railed against the godless liberals who lined their pockets and subsidized their utilities, their healthcare, their children’s lunches and their schools.
“We be another hour, maybe,” Stanislav, the driver, relayed in his thick Croatian accent. “This construction—” He made a wide shrugging gesture. “Who knows?”
“That’s fine.” Sam stared out the window. She always requested Stanislav when she was in Atlanta. He was the rare driver who understood her need for silence. Or perhaps he assumed that she was a nervous passenger. He had no way of knowing that Sam was so used to being in the back seat of a black sedan that she seldom noticed the road.
Sam had never properly learned how to drive a car. When she had turned fifteen, Rusty had taken her out in Gamma’s station wagon, but as with most family-oriented tasks, he had soon inundated her with work excuses that permanently forestalled Sam’s lessons. Gamma had tried to take up the slack, but she was an incessantly picky driver, and an outright caustic passenger. Add to the mix that both Gamma and Sam were explosive, corrosive arguers, and in the end, they had agreed that Sam should start driver’s ed during her fall semester in high school.
But then the Culpepper brothers had shown up in the kitchen.
While other girls Sam’s age were studying for their learner’s permit, she was busy trying to re-establish the connections between her toes, feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, buttocks and hips with the hope of learning how to walk again.
Not that mobility was her only obstacle. The damage done to her eyes by Zachariah Culpepper was, to use that word again, mostly superficial. Her lingering sensitivity to light was an easily solvable issue. Her tattered eyelids had been stitched back together by a plastic surgeon. Zachariah’s short, jagged fingernails had pierced the sclera, but not the choroid or the optic nerve, the retina or the cornea.
The thief of sight was a hemorrhagic stroke, subsequent to a congenital cerebral aneurysm rupturing during surgery, that had damaged some of the fibers responsible for transmitting visual information from Sam’s eyes to her brain. Her vision corrected to 20/40, a threshold for driving in most states, but the peripheral vision in her right eye fell below twenty degrees of vision.
For legal purposes, Sam was considered blind.
Fortunately, there never seemed to be a need for Sam to drive herself. She took cars to and from the airport. She walked to work, or to the market, or to various appointments and social gatherings in her immediate neighborhood. If she needed to go uptown, she could hail a cab or ask Eldrin to book a car. She had never been one of those New Yorkers who claimed to love the city but couldn’t wait to escape to the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard the moment they were able to buy a second home. Sam and Anton had never even discussed the possibility. If they wanted to see open water, they could go to Palioxori or Korcula, not trap themselves in the cloistered equivalent of a Manhattan Disney beach vacation.
Sam’s phone vibrated. She hadn’t realized she was holding it so tightly until she saw her own sweat on the margins of the screen.
Ben had been sporadically updating her since Sam had emailed back last night. First, Rusty was in surgery, then he was out of surgery and in the ICU, then he was back in surgery for a bleed that had been missed, then he was back in the ICU again.
The latest update was the same she’d seen before the plane had taken off:
No change.
Sam looked at the time. Ben had tracked the Delta flight number that Sam had provided him. His email came ten minutes after the scheduled landing time. He had no idea that Sam had lied about the flight number as well as the flight itself. Stehlik, Elton, Mallory and Sanders had a corporate jet that was kept available for partners by level of seniority. Sam’s name was not yet on the stainless steel sign opposite the elevator doors, but the contracts had been signed, her buy-in had been wired, and the jet was made ready the moment she’d had Eldrin place the call.
But Sam had not left last night.
She had looked up the number of the early Delta flight to send to Ben. She had packed a bag. She had emailed the cat sitter. She had sat at her kitchen counter. She had listened to Fosco snore and grunt as he settled on the chair beside her, and she had cried.
What was she giving up to return to Pikeville?
Sam had promised Gamma she would never return.
Though if her mother had lived, if Gamma was still inhabiting the higgledy-piggledy farmhouse, surely Sam would have returned at Christmastime, perhaps even holidays in between. Gamma would have driven down for dinners in Atlanta when Sam had business in the city. Sam would have taken her mother to Brazil or New Zealand or wherever Gamma wanted to go. The break with Charlie would not have happened. Sam would have been a proper sister, sister-in-law, perhaps even an aunt.
Sam’s relationship with Rusty would likely be the same, if not worse, because she would have to see him, but Rusty thrived on that type of adversity. Maybe Sam would have too—in that other life, the one she would have lived had she not been shot in the head.
Sam would be able-bodied.
She could be running every morning rather than swimming her lackadaisical laps. She could walk without pain. Raise her hand in the air without wondering how high it would reach that day. She could trust her mouth to clearly articulate the words in her head. She could drive herself up the interstate. She could relish the freedom of knowing that her body, her mind, her brain, were whole.
Sam swallowed back the grief that sat at the base of her throat. She had not indulged herself in these what-if scenarios since leaving the Shepherd Spinal Center. If she allowed herself the luxury of sadness now, she would become paralyzed.
She looked down at her phone, skimmed up to Ben’s first email.
Charlie needs you.
He had found
the one phrase that would make Sam respond.
But not quickly. Not without considerable equivocation.
Last night, after finally reading the email, Sam had hesitated. She had paced the apartment, her leg so weak that she had started to limp. She had taken a hot shower. She had steeped tea in her mug, tried to do her stretches, attempted to meditate, but a niggling inquisitiveness had chewed at the margins of all her procrastinations.
Charlie had never needed Sam before.
Instead of texting Ben the obvious questions—Why? What’s wrong?—Sam had turned on the news. Half an hour had passed before MSNBC reported the stabbing. They had very little information to offer. Rusty had been found by a neighbor. He was lying prone at the end of the driveway. Mail was scattered on the ground. The neighbor had called the police. The police had called an ambulance. The ambulance had called a helicopter, and now, Sam was returning to the one place to which she had promised her mother she would never return.
Sam reminded herself that, technically, she was not going to be in Pikeville. The Dickerson County Hospital was thirty minutes away, in a town called Bridge Gap. When Sam was a teenager, Bridge Gap was the big city, the place you’d go to if your boyfriend or a friend had a car and your parents were lenient.
Perhaps, when Charlie was younger, she had gone to Bridge Gap with a boy or a group of friends. Rusty had certainly been lenient; Gamma had always been the disciplinarian. Sam knew that without Gamma’s balancing check, Charlie had turned wild. College saw the worst of it. There had been several late-night calls from Athens, where Charlie was doing her undergrad at UGA. She needed money for food, for rent, for the health clinic, and once, for what had turned out to be a false pregnancy scare.
“Are you going to help me or not?” Charlie had demanded, her aggressive tone cutting off Sam’s as yet unuttered recriminations.