The cop he talked to while Jake was loaded onto a stretcher by a team of paramedics was an older man with a face like a worn-in boot. It was obvious that he didn’t believe Sam, even though David and Mara, stony-faced behind him, clearly believed him a little too much. The officer tapped his pencil against his notebook when he finished taking Sam’s statement, frowning down at his own notes, and then looked up a point beyond Sam and whistled.
Sam turned to take a look for himself and grimaced. What had to be the bulk of the guestlist for the Horseshoe Heights High benefit had apparently decided to follow David and Mara, if at a slower pace. Fancily dressed rubberneckers who had escaped the event were now peering curiously down at them, muttering amongst themselves.
At the front of the crowd was Patrick Thompson, who, as Sam stared at him, got close enough to take in the full scene before him and then shrieked, “My CAR!”
Terrified of making eye contact with the man, who was rapidly turning purple, Sam twisted back around to face the cop.
Raising his eyebrows, the cop glanced at his notebook again and said, “Right, so, just to confirm—you’re sure this is your official statement? Your full account of what happened here tonight? Nothing you might have left out, or changed around?”
For a second, Sam considered telling him the truth. It was only a second; in the next one he caught a glimpse of Jake’s ashen, unconscious face as he was loaded into the ambulance. A face that, if Sam had only been more careful, might be smiling and laughing at a party with him right now.
“I’m sure,” Sam said, resolute. “It was all me.” The cop sighed and shook his head, but didn’t argue.
ELEVEN
THEN: NOVEMBER, TWELVE YEARS AGO
Unsurprisingly, the rest of the night went poorly.
When the ambulance left, his parents crossed over to him, tight-lipped, their movements stiff. “Come on,” David said, hauled him into standing, “Let’s go home.”
Surely, he and Mara had driven to the event—Sam knew they had, having seen them leave in the car what felt like an eon before—but all three of them walked home. At the time Sam had thought it was a punishment, that he hadn’t deserved a ride after what he’d done. Looking back now, he wonders if it wasn’t just the thick cloud of shared shock.
Whatever it was, they walked in painful, loaded silence, and when they did get into the house, all Mara said was, “We’ve checked you and you’re not hypothermic or concussed; that’s good. Still, you should get some rest. Clean yourself up and go to your room, Sam.”
“I should explain,” Sam said. His tongue, he remembers, felt strange in his mouth, too heavy and ill-fitting, as though it had been swapped out for someone else’s. “It wasn’t… I wasn’t really?—”
“I said,” Mara ground out, “clean yourself up, and go to your room.”
So Sam cleaned himself up and went to his room. He got in bed. He didn’t sleep. For a while, he listened to the muted sounds of his parents arguing, the words inaudible, but the rising and falling tones suggesting raw unhappiness. Then the noise stopped and was replaced by the soft song of the night: crickets playing their low violins, frogs croaking in the nearby pond. Sam listened to that, too. He tried, as hard as he could, not to think about anything at all.
Around four in the morning, he got out of bed, walked silently down the hall to the bathroom, and threw up neatly and without fuss. If he cried, he didn’t notice. Not because he didn’t want to cry, not because he wasn’t ripped apart with remorse and regret, but because what had happened was still too incomprehensible for tears. A real part of him was convinced that if he could just fall asleep, he’d wake up to the blissful realization that it had all been a horrible dream.
But it hadn’t all been a horrible dream. Personhood is an exercise of chance and probability, every life a single marble sent rolling down a hill, and any little bump or twig might be the one that sends it careening down a totally different path. It was a hard truth to learn so entirely at seventeen. Even now, looking back, Sam doesn’t quite feel old enough to know it.
Certainly, it kept him up that night, and because he didn’t sleep, he didn’t get the chance to awaken, relieved, in his familiar, undamaged world. Instead he walked downstairs the next morning hollowed out, trapped in the hideous new one.
David and Mara were at the breakfast table, stone-cold and silent. Neither one of them would meet Sam’s eye. He tried, with increasing desperation, to tell them the real story. It was clear that with every word he said, they believed him less. Numbly, he realized that this, too, was a cost of having spun a web of intricate lies; the damn things had a half-life, still breaking down months after he’d abandoned the practice entirely. Butthe trust that had eroded away, bit by bit without Sam’s even noticing, was gone now, lost seemingly beyond rescue or repair. The knowledge came upon him wholly, a perfect, unbroken understanding that had arrived far too late.
Sam doesn’t remember now what else they talked about at that breakfast, if they talked about anything. All he remembers is thinking that he didn’t care what they did to him, that nothing could be worse than what had already happened, and then how much he’d regretted, later, ever having had that stupid thought.
And he remembers that they were interrupted before he could clear up by the sound of tires squealing, a car door slamming, and someone bellowing in what sounded like rage from the front yard.
“Oh, God,” Mara said, her already pinched expression tightening even further, as David sighed and got up to answer the door. She glared at Sam as she rubbed at a temple and snapped, “Do you see? Do you see the impact your behavior has on this family? I doubt whoever is out there on the lawn is screaming about me! Or your father! Or your sisters!”
“I know,” Sam said, his head hanging, shame burning within him like a trash fire: all noxious gases and greasy, lingering fumes. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. I was trying to do the right thing?—”
“By stealing a car, Sam? Exactly how much of a moron do you think I?—”
But she stopped, because David had opened the front door, and the screaming outside had become both louder and more intelligible.
“You get him out here right now!” This voice was clearly Mr. Thompson, and Sam was surprised by how terrifying he found it. Usually, observing as an outsider, he thought the man’s tantrums were a little pathetic, and sometimes wondered why Jake seemed so cowed by them. But being the target of hisire, knowing all that raw, uncontrolled rage was being directed at him, made Sam freeze in his seat as though glued to the cushioning.
Mrs. Thompson’s voice filtered back into the dining room, trailing his thinly, like a wisp of smoke. “Patrick, honey, please, let’s just calm down and talk about this. The neighbors are coming out now; they’re all going to see?—”
“I don’t give a good goddamn about the neighbors!” Patrick was roaring now, so loud that Mara winced, and then glanced at Sam, and then sighed and pushed back her chair, stood up. “Let them all see! Let them all stand here and watch as I give that little pissant what’s coming to him?—”
“Whoa now.” That was David, the calm, even voice Sam had heard him use dozens of times on unruly patients while Sam was, secretly and very much without official permission, hanging around the ER during his shifts. “I understand we’re all upset here, but let’s not escalate to threats.”
