Luce might be the Kind Triplet, but she’s still his little sister, and thus subject to the laws of little sisters everywhere. She groans, a slightly whining element thrown into it, and briefly sounds like the seven-year-old she once was as she snaps, “ButSam, comeon, it’smyturn with Pastrami!”
“And yet, is it ever your turn with Pastrami when she’s eaten half a pound of cocoa powder and needs her stomach pumped, I wonder?” Sam muses aloud, reflexively defending his territory the way he can’t quite help with his sisters sometimes, even Luce; even now. “I mean, if we’re moving to a taking turns model here, that implies shared ownership, right? So, let’s see, this month your half of pet insurance would be?—”
“Ugh, Sam, God. Fine,” Luce snaps, rolling her eyes at him. “I know she’s your dog, it’s just…during their finals week Daisy and Iris get a little—oh, whatever. It doesn’t matter.” She sighs, and as a stab of guilt sinks deep into Sam’s abdomen asks, a little plaintively, “What do you need her for so urgently anyway?”
Glancing briefly up at the sky for strength, Sam says, “I have a new neighbor. In the building behind the deli.”
Luce stares at him. “So?”
“So,” Sam says, and winces in spite of his best efforts not to, “it’s…Jake Thompson.”
Luce stares for another second. Then she whistles, shaking her head, says, “Dude,” and passes him the leash without any further argument.
Another long stretch of silence, one that lasts for nearly half of the next block, and includes a cross-street where they could turn back towards the apartment. Wordlessly, without looking at each other, they don’t, opting instead to take the longer route, to Pastrami’s obvious and ecstatic delight.
After a while, her voice thick with sympathetic horror, Luce says, “And you’re…sure it’s him? It’s not…I don’t know, like a thing where you got wrongly delivered mail that said that name, and so you’reassumingit’s him, but it could be some other Jake Thompson? He could be a fifty-five-year-old car salesman from Poughkeepsie?—”
“Oddly specific,” Sam points out, a question for all it isn’t one.
“Yeah, so, there’s a girl in one of my sculpture classes who should wear a T-shirt that says, ‘Ask Me About Catfish Hunting,’” Luce says, shaking her head and grinning. This results in a brief conversational detour, in which Luce explains the recent digital misfortunes that had befallen, indeed, a fifty-five-year-old car salesman from Poughkeepsie. Sam doesn’t feel bad about laughing at his misery. The guy was pretending to be a twenty-six-year-old actress online in order to con people, so Sam thinks he got what was coming to him.
Sam also thinks Luce might have a serious crush on this so-called catfish hunter, but he doesn’t mention it. That’s not the way the two of them talk about things. Born loners in a family full of people with little to no sense of what boundaries are supposed to look like, the two of them have always given eachother the grace to bring things up when they’re ready to discuss them.
Usually, anyway, because as they round the next corner and her story draws to a close, Luce says, brightly, “Anyway, about Jake—if, that is, it’s even him?—”
Sam groans a little on the words, “Yes, Luce, it’s him. It’s him! He came into the deli; I talked to him.”
At this, Luce comes to a dead stop. Sam, surprised, nearly tangles himself in Pastrami’s leash in turning around to stop, too, and raises his eyebrows at her. He tries to keep his expression cool, calm. He tries to look like someone whose stupid heart has never even thought about pounding like a runaway jackhammer.
“You talked to him?” Luce’s eyes are wide; Sam nods. “And was it, like. Okay?”
Sam shrugs. “Yeah, sure.”
She stares at him.
“I mean it wasn’t…not okay,” Sam says, putting a hand to the back of his neck.
She stares at him some more.
“Okay, fine, I don’t have any idea how it went,” Sam snaps, and starts walking again, leaving her to keep up. She does. “I don’t know how a person is supposed to tell? In these circumstances.” He thinks of the shadows in Jake’s eyes, the way he’d run off and then come back half-crazed with the awkwardness of the whole situation, and still been so… so…
“He was…Jake,” Sam says, helplessly, with a broad shrug. “You remember Jake, right? I mean, it’s okay if not; youwerebasically an infant.”
Laughing, but also lightly shoving him, she says, “Dude, I was like eight when you started bringing him around; you’re notthatmuch older than us.” Then, more soberly, she adds, “And Iwas ten—we were ten—when it all, uh. Went down? So…plenty old enough to form memories, I think.”
Sometimes, in moments like these, Sam considers the merits of assigning randomized names to traumatic events, the way they do with hurricanes. It would be so much easier to talk about the whole thing if Sam could say, “Hey, you don’t have to dance around The Hasselhoff Event, we all know what happened and we can all agree it was terrible. I don’t need you to baby me.”
But Sam can’t say that. Hedoesneed her to baby him—his baby sister, indignity of indignities—because there is no fake name with which to sum up what happened. There is no shorthand, no way around it: Talking about it would mean talking about it, and Sam hasn’t, not in over a decade. Not with anyone.
FIVE
NOW: MARCH
Sam makes it another three days without looking Jake up on the internet.
In total, he has more or less resisted the impulse for over ten years, which Sam feels is a lot more impressive. Hehas, a few times, looked Jake up on various social media platforms, found his accounts to be private, and then sat and stared in agonized indecision at the “Request to Follow” button for longer than he cares to admit. But that only happens in particularly grim moments, and it’s been ages since the last time. Months, if not years.
He never did hit the follow button, on the theory that it wouldn’t be sporting. Sam’s theory was always that he, himself, wasn’t difficult to find, and if Jake had never found him, it was because he didn’t want to.
