CHAPTER 8
Dinnertime arrives in a panicked whirl of preparation and last-minute details. I whip up linguini with the homemade puttanesca sauce Jeff’s mother taught me how to make. There’s salad, freshly baked breadsticks, wine from actual bottles, all perfectly laid out on the rough-hewn dining room table we bought the previous summer in Brooklyn.
Jeff comes home to find Rosemary Clooney standards drifting from the living room stereo and me clad in the mid-Fifties party dress I felt compelled to change into, my face pink and gleaming. God knows what’s going through his mind. Definitely confusion. Perhaps worry that I’ve gone a little overboard, which I have. But I hope there’s pride in the mix, too. At what I’ve accomplished. At the fact that after so many crowded, informal meals with his family, I finally have a guest.
Then Sam emerges from the dining room with her face scrubbed of flour and a fresh coat of lipstick and I know exactly what Jeff is thinking. Concern mixed with suspicion tinged with surprise.
“Jeff, this is Sam,” I announce.
“Samantha Boyd?” Jeff says, more to me than to her.
Sam smiles and offers her hand. “I prefer Sam.”
“Sure. Hi, Sam.” The situation has jolted Jeff so much that he almost forgets to return Sam’s handshake. When he does, it’s weak. More hand than shake. “Quincy, can I talk to you for a sec?”
Off we go into the kitchen, where I quickly brief him on the afternoon’s events, finishing with, “I hope you don’t mind that I asked her to stay for dinner.”
“It’s certainly a surprise,” he says.
“Yes, it happened very suddenly.”
“You should have called me.”
“You would have tried to talk me out of it,” I say.
Jeff ignores the remark, mostly because he knows it’s true.
“I just think it’s very strange that she suddenly showed up like this. That’s not normal, Quinn.”
“You’re sounding a bit too suspicious, Mr. Lawyer.”
“I’d just feel better knowing more about why she’s here.”
“I haven’t quite figured that out,” I say.
“Then why did you invite her to dinner?”
I want to tell him about that afternoon, how for a moment Sam was so much like Janelle that it took my breath away. But he wouldn’t understand. No one could.
“I just feel sorry for her,” I say. “After all that she’s been through, I think she just might need a friend.”
“Fine,” Jeff says. “If you’re cool with all this, then so am I.”
Yet the shadow of a scowl crossing his face tells me that he’s not entirely cool with it. Still, we go back to the dining room, where Sam politely pretends that we just weren’t talking about her. “Everything good?” she says.
I smile so wide my cheeks hurt. “Perfect. Let’s eat!”
During the meal, I play hostess, serving the food and pouring the wine, trying hard to ignore that Jeff is talking to Sam like she’s one of his clients—genial but probing. Jeff’s a conversational dentist that way. Extracting what needs to be removed.
“Quinn tells me you vanished for a few years,” he says.
“I like to think of it as laying low.”
“What was that like?”
“Peaceful. No one knowing who I was. No one knowing all the bad shit that happened to me.”
“Sounds more like being a fugitive,” Jeff says.
“I guess,” Sam replies. “Only I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“So why hide?”
“Why not?”
When Jeff can’t think of a good response, silence ensues, broken occasionally by the sound of cutlery scraping against plates. It makes me nervous, and before I know it, my wine glass is empty. I refill it before offering more to the others.
“Sam? Refill?”
She seems to intuit my nervousness and smiles to put me at ease. “Sure,” she says, gulping down the rest of the wine in her glass just so I can pour more into it.
I turn to Jeff. “More wine?”
“I’m good,” he tells me. To Sam, he says, “And where have you been living these days?”
“Here and there.”
The same answer she had given me. One that doesn’t satisfy Jeff. He lowers his fork to give Sam a cross-examination stare.
“Where, exactly?”
“No place you would have heard of,” Sam says.
“I’ve heard of all fifty states.” Jeff flashes a friendly smile. “I can even recite most of their capitals.”
“I think Sam wants to keep it a secret,” I say. “In case she wants to return there and live in anonymity.”
Across the table, Sam gives me a grateful nod. I’m looking out for her. Just like she said we should do. Even if, in this case at least, I’m just as curious as Jeff.
“I’m sure she’ll tell us eventually,” I add. “Right, Sam?”
“Maybe.” The hardness in Sam’s voice makes it clear there’ll be no maybe. Yet she tries to sandpaper her tone by adding a joke. “It depends on how good dessert is.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Jeff says. “What matters is that the two of you finally got the chance to connect. I know it means a lot to Quinn. She was really broken up about what happened with Lisa.”
“Me, too,” Sam says. “As soon as I heard about it, I decided to come here and finally talk to her.”
Jeff tilts his head. With his shaggy hair and big, brown eyes he looks like a spaniel faced with a bone. Hungry and alert.
“So you knew Quinn was in New York?”
“Over the years, I kept tabs on both her and Lisa.”
“Interesting. For what reason?”
“Curiosity, I suppose. I liked knowing they were doing OK. Or at least thinking they were.”
Jeff nods, looks down at his plate, pushes the linguini from one side to the other with his fork. Eventually, he says, “Is this your first time in Manhattan?”
“No. I’ve been here a few times before.”
“When was your last visit?”
“Years ago,” Sam says. “When I was a kid.”
“So before all that stuff happened at that hotel?”
“Yeah.” Sam gazes at him from across the table, eyes narrowed, on the razor’s edge of a glare. “Before all that stuff.”
Jeff pretends not to notice the sarcastic edge placed on that last word. “So it’s been a while, I guess.”
“It has.”
“And Quincy’s well-being is the only reason you came here?”
I reach out to pat Jeff’s hand. A silent signal that he’s out of bounds, taking things too far. He does the same thing to me when we’re visiting my mother and I get too argumentative about her views on, oh, everything.
“What other reason could there be?” Sam says.
“I suppose there could be plenty,” Jeff replies, my hand still heavy over his. “Maybe you’re seeking some publicity in the wake of Lisa’s death. Maybe you need money.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
“I hope so. I hope you only came here to check in on Quinn.”
“That was always Lisa’s wish,” Sam says. “To have the three of us meet, you know? And help each other.”
The mood has irrevocably shifted. Suspicion hovers over the table, humid and sour. Impulsively, I raise my glass. It’s almost empty again, a thin circle of red swirling around its bottom.
“I think we should make a toast,” I announce. “To Lisa. Although the three of us never got the chance to meet, I think she’s here in spirit. I also think she’d be pleased to see at least two of us together at last.
“To Lisa,” Sam says, playing along.
I slosh more wine into my glass. Then more into Sam’s, even though it’s still half-full. When our glasses clink over the table, it’s too hard, too loud, the crystal a hair’s breadth from cracking. A wave of pinot noir breaches the edge of my glass, splashing onto the salad and breadsticks below. The wine seeps into the bread, leaving behind splotches of red.
I let out a nervous giggle. Sam pops out one of her shotgun-blast laughs.
Jeff, not amused, gives me a look he sometimes whips out during awkward work functions. The Are-you-drunk? look. I’m not. Well, not yet. But I can see why he thinks I am.
“So what do you do for a living, Sam?” he asks.
She shrugs. “A little of this, a little of that.”
“I see,” Jeff says.
“I’m between jobs at the moment.”
“I see,” Jeff says again.
I take another sip of wine.
“And you’re a lawyer?” Coming from Sam, it sounds like an accusation.
“I am,” Jeff says. “A public defender.”
“Interesting. Bet all types of people come your way.”
“They certainly do.”
Sam leans back in her chair, one arm crossed over her stomach. The other grips her wine glass, holding it close to her lips. Smiling over the rim, she says, “And are all your clients criminals?”
Jeff mirrors Sam’s stance. Reclined in his chair, clenching his wine glass. I watch the two of them face off, the half-eaten meal heavy and unsettled in the pit of my stomach. It reminds me of my eating disorder days, when everything I ate created the irresistible urge to throw it all back up.
“My clients are innocent until proven guilty,” Jeff says.
“But most of them are, right? Proven guilty?”
“I suppose you could say that.”
“How does that make you feel? Knowing the guy sitting next to you in court in a borrowed suit did all those things he’s accused of?”
“Are you asking me if I feel guilty about it?”
“Do you?”
“No,” Jeff says. “I feel noble knowing that I’m one of the few people giving that guy in the borrowed suit the benefit of the doubt.”
“But what if he did something really bad?” Sam asks.
“How bad are we talking about?” Jeff says. “Murder?”
“Worse.”
I know where Sam’s going with this, and my stomach clenches even more. I put a hand over it, rubbing slightly.
“It doesn’t get much worse than murder,” Jeff says, also knowing what Sam’s up to and not caring. He’ll gladly follow her to the edge of an argument. I’ve seen it happen before.
“Have you represented a murderer?”
“I have,” Jeff says. “In fact, I’m doing so right now.”
“And do you like it?”
“It doesn’t matter if I like it. It needs to be done.”
“What if the guy killed several people?”
“He still needs defending,” Jeff says.
“What if it’s the guy who hurt me and killed all those people at The Nightlight Inn? Or the guy who did all that shit to Quincy and murdered her friends?” Sam’s anger is palpable now—a heat pulsing across the table. Her voice picks up speed, each subsequent word getting harder, rougher. “Knowing all of that, would you still happily sit next to that motherfucker and try to keep him out of jail?”
Jeff remains motionless, save for a slight working of his jaw. His eyes never leave Sam. He doesn’t even blink.
“It must be convenient,” he says. “To have something to blame for everything that went wrong in your life. To be able to come into a stranger’s apartment—my apartment—and tear him to pieces because of a horrible thing that happened—”
“Jeff.” My throat is parched, my voice soft and easy to ignore. “Stop.”
“—to you in the past. To blame him in some way for something he had nothing to do with. Quinn could do that. God knows, she has every right to. But she doesn’t. Because she’s managed to put it behind her. She’s strong like that. She’s not some—”
“Jeff, please.”
“—messed-up victim who skipped out on her family and friends instead of trying to move past something that happened more than a decade ago.”
“Enough!”
I leap from my seat, tipping my wine glass, its contents gushing over the table. I sop it up with my napkin. White fabric turning red.
“Jeff. Bedroom. Now.”
We stand by the closed door, facing each other, our bodies a study in contrasts. Jeff is calm and loose, arms at his sides. Mine are a straightjacket across my chest, which lifts and falls in exasperation.
“You didn’t need to be so harsh.”
“After what she said to me? I think I did, Quinn.”
“You have to admit, you kind of started it.”
“By being curious?”
“By being suspicious,” I say. “You were giving her the third degree out there. This isn’t court. She’s not one of your clients, Jeff.”
My voice is too loud, ringing off the walls. Jeff and I both look to the door, pausing to see if Sam heard us. I’m sure she did. Even if she has managed to miss my increasingly shrill tone, it’s obvious we’re again talking about her.
“I was asking her pretty rational questions,” Jeff says, lowering his voice to make up for my volume. “Don’t you think she’s being evasive?
“She doesn’t want to talk about this stuff. I can’t blame her.”
“That still gave her no right to talk to me like that. As if I’m the one who attacked her.”
“She’s sensitive.”
“Bullshit. She was egging me on.”
“She was defending herself,” I say. “She’s not an enemy, Jeff. She’s a friend. Or at least she can be.”
“Do you even want to be friends with her? Until yesterday, you seemed perfectly happy having nothing to do with this Final Girls stuff. So what’s changed?”
“Other than Lisa Milner’s suicide?”
A sigh from Jeff. “I understand how much it’s upset you. I know you’re sad and disappointed about what happened. But why this sudden interest in becoming friends with Sam? You don’t even know her, Quinn.”
“I know her. She went through the same thing I did, Jeff. I know exactly who she is.”
“I’m just worried that if you two get close, you’ll start dwelling on what happened to you. And you’ve moved past it.”
Jeff means well. I know this. And living with me isn’t always easy. I know this, too. But that doesn’t keep his comment from stinging like a slap.
“My friends were slaughtered, Jeff. That’s not something I’ll ever move past.”
“You know I didn’t mean it like that.”
I lift my chin, defiant in my anger. “Then what did you mean?”
“That you’ve become more than a victim,” Jeff says. “That your life—our life—isn’t defined by that night. I don’t want that to change.”
“My being nice to Sam isn’t going to change anything. And it’s not like I have a whole army of friends beating down the front door.”
This isn’t something I plan to admit. My loneliness is something I generally keep from Jeff. I smile sunnily when he comes home from work and asks me how my day was. Fine, I always say, when in fact my days are normally listless and dull. Long afternoons spent baking in isolation, sometimes talking to the oven just to hear the sound of my voice.
Instead of friends, I have acquaintances. Former classmates and co-workers. Ones with husbands and kids and office jobs that aren’t conducive to regular contact. Ones I purposefully kept at a distance until they became nothing more substantial than occasional text messages or emails.
“I really need this, Jeff,” I say.
Jeff grips my shoulders, kneading them. He looks into my eyes, seeing something out of place, something unspoken.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“I got an email,” I say.
“From Sam?”
“Lisa. She sent it an hour before she—”
Offed herself, I want to say. Finished what Stephen Leibman didn’t get the chance to do. “Passed away.”
“What did it say?”
I recite the email word for word, the text etched into my memory.
“Why would she do that?” Jeff says, as if I somehow have an answer.
“I don’t know. I’ll never know. But for some reason she was thinking about me right before she died. And all I can think about is the fact that, if I had seen that email in time, I could have possibly saved her.”
Tears form, hot in the corners of my eyes. I try to blink them back, to no avail. Jeff pulls me to him, my head against his chest, his arms tight around my back.
“Jesus, Quinn. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“You had no way of knowing.”
“But you can’t let yourself think you’re responsible for Lisa’s death.”
“I don’t,” I say. “But I do think I missed my chance to help her. I don’t want to do the same thing with Sam. I know she’s rough around the edges. But I think she needs me.”
Jeff sighs a long exhalation of defeat.
“I’ll play nice,” he says. “I promise.”
We kiss and make up, tears salty on my lips. I wipe them away while Jeff lets go of me, jiggling his arms to release the tension. I give my shirt a tug and smooth out the tear-stained spot I left on his. Then we’re out of the bedroom, moving down the hall with hands entwined. A unified front.
In the dining room, we find the table unoccupied, Sam’s chair pushed away from it. She’s not in the kitchen, either. Or the living room. In the foyer, the spot by the door where her knapsack sat is now an empty patch of floor.
Once again, Samantha Boyd has vanished.