Laugh (25 page)

He turned down a side street to head back to the hospital. He slowed down as much as he could because he didn’t want to end the day this way with her.

“I understand bad days, Nina.”

She looked down at her lap.

He focused on navigating the narrow streets of the south side, to let himself talk while he drove, whatever he wanted to say. This was the only way he and his dad could talk sometimes, when things were the worst between them.

“I wanted you to come with me tonight because I’m nervous about seeing Des. I mean, I email her a lot, but seeing her, even over Skype, I’m nervous. I think I’m nervous because I know she’ll be so happy, and the thing is, it makes me a dick, but the happier she is the less likely it is she’ll come home again.”

He stole a glance at her.

He couldn’t tell where she was at in her head. She was so still, but her hands were in her lap; it didn’t seem like she was going to try to bail out of his car again. He remembered that feeling, though, sitting in the deep front passenger seat of his dad’s limousine. Remembered how he was certain he’d come out of his skin, how he couldn’t even look at his dad, how he’d stare at the landmarks as they rolled by the window.

His dad wouldn’t stop talking. Would say things he almost never would. Trusting Sam with his actual thoughts. It wouldn’t even be a mile before Sam would feel compelled to say something. Feel something that wasn’t anger or terminal restlessness.

“You get walking around with this stuff all the time, Nina. Sadness. Fucking up with people.” He thought he heard her make a noise and his throat tightened. “Not that I think
you
fuck up with people, I’m the one that’s good at that, but I think you get it. Like, all this is kind of a baseline, right?”

When he looked over her brows were furrowed. He gripped the steering wheel, slowed down a little more. He needed her to understand.

“Not that you can’t be happy, but there are all these people we love and we’re doing our best, and losing and saying good-bye to some of them when we don’t want to. Like that’s just where we start. The loss all over, like you said back when you first met me.”

“I understand what you mean, Sam.” Her voice was almost a whisper, but he’d take it. He’d fucking take it.

“So I’m not some kind of genius doctor. You don’t even have to be a genius to start with, to be a doctor,
it turns out. What I like is learning exactly what I should do to help someone, and then I get to do that thing. That’s it. I feel good about that.” The hospital drop-off loop was coming up, but he diverted to a frontage road to drive around and come back.

He didn’t want to drop her off without knowing it was okay.

Whatever it was.

Sometimes his dad would drive in aimless circles around their neighborhood, turning through one side street after the next.

“I don’t know how you feel about farming, but I like volunteering so much because it’s like what I said. I learn how I can get something done, then I do it. I like that. I probably do like it more than being a doctor right now, because I have to do all this other stuff that isn’t being a doctor. There are times when I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, and I won’t know for a long time. You probably know a lot more about that, right? How far ahead you have to make decisions, you know? You get that, are good at it. I’m not good at it.”

“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.

“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 love 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.