Chapter Four
Present Day
Samantha
“What deep wounds ever closed
without a scar?”
–Lord Byron
The past ten hours could have been better, but they could also have been so much worse.
All in all, I’d say the flight was a success. I haven’t thought about any of the things I promised myself I wouldn’t, and Danny and I broke the ice after a long, difficult dry spell.
I’d been afraid being intimate again would be awkward at best, awful at worst, but it was neither of those things. After months of feeling nothing but numbness, interspersed with bursts of almost debilitating regret, I was shocked to find Danny could make my body do more than flutter. He’d made me burn, heating me up so quickly I’d already come on his hand by the time my mind caught up with what was going on.
It had caught up eventually, and done its best to ruin things, but I had managed to regain control.
I am in control.
I’m taking my life back and soon there won’t be anything anyone can do to stop me.
As we trudge up the Jetway, I slip Danny’s phone from the outer pocket of his pack and drop it into my purse without him noticing. I’ll take care of both of our phones in the bathroom. Once I do, there’s no way any of the bad things will be able to taint our fresh start.
Danny and I step out into Auckland Airport’s International terminal, where the afternoon sun is shining brightly through the floor to ceiling windows, and optimism floods through me for the first time in ages. My chest relaxes and my spirit lifts as we let ourselves be carried along by the crowd, through a massive ornamental archway where carved monkeys, birds, and a cat god with golden eyes stare down at all the exhausted travelers, warning us that we’re not in Kansas anymore.
As we pass beneath the warm, honey-and-sunset colored wood, a shiver passes through me. I can feel the new Sam slipping more firmly into place. I’m ready to throw my arms wide and embrace this adventure, and am positively giddy by the time we reach the restrooms just before customs.
“I’m going to run in and freshen up,” I say, giving Danny’s hand a squeeze before I release it.
“Me too,” he says. “Meet you by the water fountain.”
“Okay!” I practically jog through the burnt orange hallway into the mostly deserted bathroom. I can’t wait to pull the SIM cards from our phones and smash them to pieces.
I should have taken care of mine before we left Maui, but I wasn’t thinking beyond getting the hell out of the airport. But neither of us have turned our phones back on after we shut them down for takeoff, and I’ve been paying my own cell bill for years, so there shouldn’t be any way for Dad or Penny to trace my journey to the opposite hemisphere.
Penny offered to keep me on the family cell plan, but as soon as I could afford it I insisted on getting my own phone. I wanted to be able to call Danny as often as I needed to without anyone patrolling my texts or the times of my calls. Penny had stopped giving me shit for “wasting my life” on the phone years before, when she realized trying to shame me into spending less time texting Danny was a waste of breath, but I didn’t like her having that window into my life.
Even back then, before the—
I shut the thought down before it can reach completion and focus on locking the door to the handicapped bathroom behind me and slipping the SIM cards from the backs of the phones.
My thoughts are stupid sheep that keep wandering toward the cliff at the edge of the pasture, but if I keep catching them and shepherding them toward safer ground, they’re going to learn where not to go. Eventually, I’ll be able to relax my guard, and one day I might forget there was ever a cliff to begin with.
All things seem possible now that Danny and I are here with thousands of miles between us and danger.
I drop the cards to the tile floor near the garbage can and use the edge of my phone to smash them in half before throwing the pieces and both phones into the trash can with a satisfied sigh.
Now, no one can call me, and my dad can’t call Danny. There’s a chance I would have been able to get by with swapping out the SIM cards, but on the off chance that Danny had Dad’s number stored on his phone, not the card, I couldn’t risk it.
I stand staring at the trash can for a long moment, the realization that I’ve just said goodbye to my family settling around my shoulders.
Mom never recovered from losing Dad, and has been more like an unpredictable girlfriend I don’t trust to borrow my shoes than a mother the past seven years, but I still love her. Dad is so far up Penny’s ass it’s ridiculous and way more impressed with the wealth he married into than anything I’ve accomplished in my twenty years of life, but I love him, too. I even love Penny. She’s tried to do the right thing by my little brother and me, stepping in to play Mom when my own mother couldn’t be bothered, and always making sure Erick and I had the best of everything.
I love all three of my parents, but our relationships have become too complicated, and I have no idea what they’ll think when they find out the truth.
Maybe they’ll hate me, maybe they’ll pity me—either way they’ll want me to do the right thing. My parents and stepparent are all very much into Doing the Right Thing, in facing the consequences of your actions and fessing up to your failings. They would want me to stop running, but I can’t and I won’t.
It’s best to end things now, with a clean break, without even turning on my phone to listen to the messages that I have no doubt are waiting in my voicemail box.
I take a deep cleansing breath and let grief wash through me and wash back out again, like a wave lapping against the shore before being absorbed back into the ocean.
The thought of losing touch with Erick hits harder than anyone else, but eventually I loosen my grip on that regret and send it out to sea with the rest. Erick and I aren’t super close, but we have fun together and I’ve always felt obligated to look out for him. To keep him from starving to death when my mom was mired in misery, and pull him aside for a long talk about not doing dumb shit when I caught him dropping acid on the beach with his friends. But he’s graduating from high school this year and going to college next fall. He’s starting his own life and doesn’t need me the way he used to.
Besides, there might come a day when it will be okay to reach out to my little brother. He’s so wrapped up in his own life that he’s never been terribly interested in mine. There was a time when that hurt, but now I’m grateful he’s self-absorbed.
I’m grateful for all the people who don’t care enough to stick their nose into my business, who are so busy with their own personal dramas they haven’t noticed that I’m falling apart.
“Not anymore,” I whisper, shifting my gaze from the trash can to my reflection in the mirror above the sink.
I’ve been avoiding my reflection the past few months, but now I force myself to take a good, long look.
I’ve lost weight, and have faint hollows below my cheekbones for the first time in my life, but I don’t look gaunt or sickly. The new leanness gives my face structure it didn’t have before. The strong angles of my jaw are visible instead of blending into my chin, and my eyes look even larger than they used to. I’ve always thought my eyes were my best feature, but they’re also my greatest weakness. I’ve never been good at hiding what I’m thinking or feeling. It all shows in my eyes.
Or it used to.
Now, holding my own gaze, I can’t see a hint of the giddiness I felt when I entered the bathroom, the sadness I was feeling a moment ago, or the anxiety pricking at my nerve endings doing its best to convince me that crushing a couple of SIM cards won’t be enough to keep my secret safe. I look tired, which is to be expected after a flight to the other side of the world, but not troubled. My eyes are…empty, and only seem to grow emptier the longer I stand staring at myself.
Even when I start to feel disturbed by the lack of emotion in my expression, nothing flickers in my eyes. The electrical lines connecting my feelings to my face have been severed, leaving my soul adrift in my physical body, contained, but not connected.
“Sam? Are you okay in there?” Danny’s voice echoes through the empty bathroom.
“Yes, just brushing my teeth,” I call back, breaking eye contact with my reflection with a sharp shake of my head. “Be out in a minute.”
I fish my toiletry bag out of my purse and give my teeth a quick brush. I mop my face with a cleansing cloth, drip a couple drops of Visine in each eye, and smooth on sunscreen and a fresh coat of peach lip gloss before working curl cream through my fuzzy hair. I concentrate on moving through my post-plane-flight ritual swiftly and efficiently. I don’t linger over the squashed curls at the back of my head, and I don’t make eye contact with my reflection again.
It’s natural to be feeling drained after a ten-hour flight, and there’s no room for existential angst in my fresh start. I’ll just have to fake it until I make it, and one day soon the smiles I’m forcing will come naturally.