Sam, page 18
“Yes.”
“And you know what you are not going to be doing the next few weeks?”
“Climbing.”
“Bingo.”
“Ow.”
“Sorry,” the doctor says more gently. “You’re a champ.” Maybe he is impressed Sam isn’t crying, except for a couple small involuntary tears.
Her mom is the one who’s scared. Sam hugs her around the shoulders when they finally get out and walk back to the car in the warm summer night. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” Sam tries to reassure her.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Courtney says. “I’m not going to lecture you.”
“Okay,” Sam says hopefully.
“But what are you doing ripping up your hand?”
“It’s not like I was trying to hurt myself,” says Sam.
“And why are you climbing with people who won’t take you to the emergency room?”
“It wasn’t their fault.”
“Oh really?”
“I won’t do anything until my hand is better,” Sam promises. The doctor already explained that if she climbs too soon her stitches will open and her hand will get infected, and she will have to come back and get sewn up all over again. “I won’t even try,” she promises, but she does not say she will stay home.
* * *
—
It’s weird when she comes back to Red Rocks. The others respected her before, but now she is like their teacher. Even standing on the ground, she gives advice like I don’t think that way is doable or Try your other foot. They say, What do you think? and trust her judgment if the rock is slippery. They also treat her like You know what, you’re a little crazy.
“I still don’t know how you did that,” Sean says after he tries to climb Sam’s route and fails.
“While bleeding,” Justin reminds him.
“You have a high tolerance for pain,” says Amber.
Sam says, “Not really.”
“It was like you couldn’t even feel it,” Kyle tells her.
“I felt it.” Sam looks at her stitched-up hand. The thread is black and gunky; it’s an ugly seam across her palm.
For now, Justin carries all her stuff—even her backpack. She says, “It’s not like I’ve broken all my bones.”
“But it’s easy.” Justin carries her mat and bags all the way down to the parking lot and they plan what they will climb once she gets her stitches out. He knows this boulder that nobody else likes.
“Can I see it?” Sam says, as they reach the cars.
He looks up at the sky. It’s almost dark. “Come early next time.”
Kyle teases as he gets into his truck, “Watch out for him.”
Sam and Justin look at each other and start laughing. “I want to see it now,” Sam says.
* * *
—
It’s dusk. The air is still. At first Sam can’t make out the whole boulder in the shadows, but then she touches it and she looks up and it is so big it blocks her view, a highball leaning sharply like a sinking ship.
Justin says, “The upper part is easy.”
“Yeah.”
“But this part.” They walk around and feel the underside of that great boulder and it’s like the flank of a gigantic animal. How could you ever climb up and over? You would have to cling and scramble all across like a spider in a cave.
“How would you even start?” she says.
“Oh, I’ve started,” he tells her, and she can imagine how many times he’s tried. “I saw this boulder when I first started climbing.”
The rock face is comforting; it shields you. “How did you learn?” Sam asks.
“Climbing?”
“Yeah.”
“Not from my dad.”
She confesses, “I didn’t learn from my dad either. He never took me here. He just talked about it.”
She waits for Justin to ask, Then why did you say he taught you everything? But he says, “My dad doesn’t talk to me at all.”
“Why?”
“Because a long time ago he was angry at my mom—and I took her side.”
“What was he angry for?”
“She left him for Jesus.”
“Oh.” In the twilight, she can’t read his face. “Did you leave for Jesus too?”
“No, just for my mom.”
Does she seem confused? Too solemn? He takes off his brown hat and claps it on her head. Instinctively, she touches the brim. The hat is so old and battered. It’s like a relic. She almost can’t believe he lets her wear it, even for a second. She asks, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
So, he is six years older—but it doesn’t matter. She’s just as good as he is on the wall, and maybe better. He touches the tipped boulder, and he says, “You’re probably the only person I know who would try this one.”
“I would try,” she tells him. “I doubt I would get anywhere.”
“Yes, you would.”
“Nah.”
He looks at her in the hat. “You know exactly what you’re doing.”
“No, I don’t know anything.”
“But you climb like you do. You believe in yourself.”
“No, I don’t. It’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?”
She struggles for the words because it’s harder and also simpler than he imagines. “I don’t know anything, and I don’t believe anything, but I keep going anyway.”
46
Despite her stitches, she works long hours. Her mom says go to school go to school go to school, but Sam is earning good money. Her mom says, Sam, just register, but Sam takes Noah out and buys him hockey skates instead. Courtney won’t let her pay the bills, but she can’t stop Sam from taking Noah to Dick’s Sporting Goods.
When they get there and the guy is measuring Noah’s feet, he asks, “New or used?”
Noah practically falls off the bench when Sam says, “New.”
They never buy new skates. Noah is always growing, so they buy used skates in good condition, but they’re broken in and scuffed. Not today. The salesman carries out boxes of black skates and they are stiff and perfect. They cost twice as much, but they were never even laced before. When Noah stands up in them, he looks gigantic, and also shy. Under his breath he says, “Aren’t they too expensive?”
Sam says no, because she has money in the bank. She can go ahead and buy the skates and also a new helmet and new pads.
Noah doesn’t say a word as they walk out to the parking lot with their Dick’s shopping bags. The sun is beating down on their shoulders and he doesn’t say thank you and she doesn’t say you’re welcome. They just look at each other and they are both thinking the same thing. Did we just spend four hundred dollars?
“This is your reward,” Sam says, as they drive home.
“For what?”
“For how hard you’re gonna work this year and how you will behave.”
“It’s a reward for what I’m going to do?”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t that backward?”
She looks at him and she thinks, probably. But he needs skates now, not at the end of the season.
He opens up the box and his blades are mirrors in the sun. “I didn’t need new ones,” he says, but he is glowing, and she is too.
But when they get home their mom is serious. She smiles when Noah shows off his new gear, and then she says, “Okay, Noah, can you get all those boxes into the recycling?”
All through dinner Courtney hardly says anything.
“What?” Sam asks at last, when she is clearing the table and her mom is washing dishes.
“Nothing,” Courtney says.
“What’s wrong?” Sam presses. “What’s wrong with buying new?”
“Nothing.”
They are standing together in the galley kitchen and the only way you can go in or out is by turning sideways. “Why are you annoyed at me?”
“I’m not,” says Courtney.
“Then what is it?”
“You know what.”
Sam looks at her mom and says, “You’re the one who wants to go to school. Not me.”
“I have to work!”
“I’ll work for you,” says Sam. “I’ll work and you go back for accounting.”
“No, that’s not realistic,” her mom says.
“Why not?”
“It’s just not going to happen.”
“But why?”
“First of all, I’m not good at it.”
“You would be if you didn’t have to do other things.”
“You would crush accounting,” Courtney says. “If you would just decide.”
“I did decide.” Sam is trying to squeeze between her mom and the counter, but Courtney won’t move. There is no way around her.
Sam knows something then. She will do what her mom wants. It’s because her mom has done so much that Sam can’t say no. She can’t slip past so much sacrifice. She will register. Except every day she puts it off.
Every day her mom says, Did you? and Sam says, I will, and her mom says, When? And then Courtney says, What if you missed the deadline?
By the end of August, Sam can hear her mom’s voice everywhere she goes. Home and car, the UPS store, the Atomic Bean. Red Rocks is the only place that’s out of range.
As soon as Sam gets her stitches out, she and Justin start meeting at the big tipped boulder. They come evenings, because it is still light. Even before Sam’s hand is strong again, they keep working on the project.
One Friday they try for three hours straight. They work and work, climbing, scrambling, falling, strategizing. Then they gobble up some trail mix and drink some water and keep going, but it’s no use. They collapse onto Justin’s mat and they are bitten up and bruised. Sam says, “We’re not gonna solve this in our lifetime.”
“Yes, we will,” says Justin. “You will, at least.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“Because I know what you can do.”
“You sound like my mom.”
“Well then she’s right.”
“She wants me to be an accountant.”
“She can’t make you,” Justin points out.
Sam rolls on her side to look at him. “How did you get out of going to college?”
“I did go for a year.”
“Really?”
“I went to UNH.”
She looks at him all scraped up and tries to picture him in a classroom. “What did you go for?”
“Writing.”
“But now you’re a gardener.”
“Yeah, writing was a waste of money.”
Bugs are swarming, so she scrambles to her feet. “That’s the thing. I think accounting might be a waste too.”
“Nah, it’s practical.”
“Not if you’re unmotivated.”
He gets up too, and they roll up their mats. When they’re done and they start walking, he says, “Life is short.”
“My mom doesn’t think so.”
He turns to her and asks, “Why would you study for something you don’t even want to do?”
She slaps him hard across the face.
He is startled, his cheek streaked with a dead mosquito and his own blood.
“Sorry! I had to kill it. Did I hurt you?”
“No,” he says, half laughing.
“What?”
“You sounded kind of hopeful.”
“Why would I want to hurt you?”
“Just because you can.”
“That’s weird.”
“I think you’re a little warlike,” he tells her.
“I am not.”
“See, you’re still fighting with me.”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“No.”
She wants to say, What are we doing then? But she does not. She wants to say, What’s happening, but if she speaks, then it will stop.
47
Justin has a journal he carries with him. The cover is black, the pages are pure white. When he was younger, his mom gave him fine-line pens for Bible study. Now he uses them to write about plants. He writes in block print The Hydrangea Is Changing From Light Pink to Dark and then he will draw the flowers. He will draw a fern just starting to unfurl, and outline oak leaves.
One Friday it starts drizzling, and he seals his journal in a plastic bag and stuffs it in his backpack, so it won’t get wet. “This book is my Bible,” he tells Sam.
They are sheltering in the lee of the tipped boulder and she says, “Does that mean you’re writing your own religion?”
“I think I’d have to be more detail oriented for that.”
“Like write down all the things you aren’t allowed to do.”
“Yeah, I’m not into rules.”
Sam frowns. “Well, you’re lucky you can live that way.”
“It’s not luck. You can too.”
“Not really.”
“You mean you have to listen to your mom.”
“Well.” Sam looks out at the fine rain.
“You decided that she’s right.”
She can’t say that. She doesn’t think her mom is right about her and accounting. She just says, “She’s done a lot.”
“So, you registered.”
“Yeah.”
“What if you try a bunch of things?” he says. “Like a bunch of different classes.”
“I’m actually good at math,” she tells him. “I don’t think accounting will be hard.”
“Just boring.”
“How do you know?” she demands. “Have you ever taken bookkeeping?”
“No.”
“So, don’t be prejudiced.”
“Okay. Don’t be angry.”
“I’m not. I’m jealous!” He smiles, but she is serious. “You climb all day. You work in people’s yards and write in your journal about ferns. You do whatever you want.”
“Not always.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that. They are standing so close in the slight shelter of the rock. Slowly, she asks, “What would you do in my place?”
“You know what I would do.”
“Study something else?”
“Yeah. You could do a million things. That’s all I’m saying.”
She says, “But I don’t want to do a million things.”
“Neither do I.”
The rain is so light that you can’t see it, but they are both wet. His hat is dripping, but he keeps his eyes on her when he takes it off. She says, “What do you want to do, then?”
He shakes his head.
“Tell me.”
“No.”
She thinks, Show me then, but he is waiting. When he touches her cheek, he brushes the rain off. When he looks at her, she can see he does not know what will happen. He does not take her in his arms. There’s no forcing everything at once. No rush, except for her own heart.
48
His hat is on the ground. His hands are on her shoulders and he feels so good, his mouth, his tongue. His breath is in her ears. They are both slippery with rain and sweat. They pull up their soaked shirts, and then they take them off, and he is salty when she licks him. He whispers, “Wait, wait, let me look at you.”
Probably someone will come embarrass them. Probably, but it doesn’t happen, and then they start forgetting. They lie down on his climbing mat, and gradually they pull themselves under the tilting bolder. His hands slip over her breasts, and her bare waist, and then underneath her shorts, until her heels dig into the ground, ripping up the moss.
And even then, she reminds herself, This isn’t serious. This isn’t dangerous. It’s like swimming because the water is warm. It’s not like you have to drown yourself in him.
It’s weird, how they understand each other. He says, Let’s take it slow, and she says, Yeah. But even as they say that, they both know that nothing slow is going to happen. They are filthy wet, but they don’t want to leave.
Only when they hear hikers and dogs do they sit up and collect their stuff. They head back to their cars, and then they drive to Justin’s place in Gloucester.
He leads the way and Sam drives after him. The road turns to gravel. Then to dirt.
By the time they arrive and park their cars, she is getting cold. Her hair is wet and tangled, her arms streaked with mud.
She says, “This is where you live?”
He lives all the way at the end of the dirt road near the marshes. The house belongs to his great-grandma Ann and it’s Victorian, painted the darkest green. The house has a steep roof, and bay windows, and a wraparound porch.
Justin says, “Come in.”
“Is it all right?”
The floor creaks, and the paint is peeling. “Ann?” he calls softly as he opens the door. “She’s sleeping,” he whispers.
“Where?” There are so many doors and hallways.
“Sh. Come upstairs.”
He has the whole third floor, which is a bunch of little rooms and a half bath. His bedroom has a window like a porthole. If you stand on the desk, you can see the ocean.
To take a shower you go downstairs to the bathroom on the second floor. Quietly, quietly, so you don’t wake Ann.
In the shower, they are half whispering, half laughing. The water pressure isn’t strong, so they take turns standing under and then shivering. Sam asks, “How long have you lived here?”
“Since high school.” Justin is lathering Sam’s whole body, front and back. “Ann let me live here when my mom kicked me out.”
