Sam Quinn alternated her arms, left, then right, then left again, as she cut a narrow channel through the cool waters of the swimming pool. She turned her head every third stroke and drew in a long breath. Her feet fluttered. She waited for the next breath.
Left-right-left-breathe.
She had always loved the calmness, the simplicity, of the freestyle stroke; that she had to concentrate just enough on swimming so that all extraneous thoughts cleared her mind. No telephones rang under the water. No laptops pinged with urgent meetings. There was no reading emails in the pool.
She saw the two-meter line, the indication that the lane was about to end, and coasted until her fingers touched the wall.
Sam kneeled on the floor of the pool, breathing heavily, checking her swimmer’s watch: 2.4 kilometers at 150 seconds per 100 meters, so 37.5 seconds per 25-meter length.
She felt a pang of disappointment when she saw the numbers, which were within seconds of yesterday’s, because her competitive streak glowed in white-hot opposition to her physical capabilities. Sam glanced down the length of the pool, wondering if she had another short burst inside of her.
No.
Today was Sam’s birthday. She was not going to tire herself out so much that she had to use her cane to walk to the office.
She pushed herself up onto the edge of the pool. She quickly showered off the salt water. The tips of her fingers were furrowed and rough against the Egyptian cotton towel. Somewhere in the back of Sam’s mind, her mother’s voice told her that the body’s response to being submerged so long was to wrinkle the pads of the fingers and toes in order to improve grip.
Gamma had been forty-four when she’d died, the same age that Sam was now.
Or at least would be in another three and a half hours.
Sam kept on her prescription goggles while she rode the elevator up to her apartment. The chrome on the back of the doors showed her wavy reflection. Slim build. Black one-piece suit. Sam ran her fingers through her hair to help it dry. Twenty-eight years ago, she had walked into the woods behind the farmhouse with hair the color of a raven’s feather. Almost a month later, she’d awakened in the hospital to find a shock of white stubble growing from her shaved head.
Sam had gotten used to the double-takes, the surprised looks when strangers realized that the gray-haired old woman in the back of the classroom, buying wine at the supermarket, walking through the park, was actually a young girl.
Though admittedly, that wasn’t happening nearly as much lately. Sam’s husband had warned her that one day, her face would finally catch up to her hair.
The elevator doors slid open.
The sun was winking through the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined her apartment. Down below, the Financial District was wide awake, car horns and cranes and the usual din of activity muffled behind the triple-paned glazing.
Sam walked to the kitchen, turning off lights as she went. She exchanged her goggles for her glasses. She put out food for the cat. She filled the kettle. She prepared her tea infuser, mug and spoon, but before boiling the water, she went to the yoga mat in her living room.
She took off her glasses. She ran through a series of stretches to keep her muscles limber. She ended up on the mat, legs crossed. She rested the backs of her hands on her knees. She touched her middle fingers to her thumbs in a light pinch. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and considered her brain.
Several years after she had been shot, a psychiatrist had shown Sam a homunculus of the motor areas of her brain. The man had wanted her to see the path the bullet had traveled so that Sam could understand the structures that had been damaged. He wanted her to think about those structures at least once a day, to spend as much time as she could muster in contemplating the individual folds and crevices, and to visualize her brain and body working in perfect tandem as they had before.
Sam had resisted. The exercise seemed some part wishful thinking, most part voodoo.
Now, it was the only thing that kept her headaches at bay, her equilibrium in check.
Sam had consequently done more in-depth research of the brain, seen MRIs and studied dense neurological tomes, but that first drawing had never been replaced as a guide through her meditation. In her mind’s eye, the cross-sections of the left motor and sensory cortices were forever highlighted in bright yellow and green. Each section was labeled with the correspondingly influenced anatomy. Toes. Ankle. Knee. Hip. Trunk. Arm. Wrist. Fingers.
Sam felt an analogous tingle in the different areas of her body as she silently examined the factions that made up the whole.
The bullet had entered her skull on the left, just above her ear. The left side of the brain controls the right, the right side the left. In medical terms, the injury was considered to have taken place in a more superficial portion of the brain. Sam had always found the word superficial misleading. True, the projectile had not crossed the midbrain or lodged deep into the limbic system, but Broca’s Area, where speech takes place, Wernicke’s Area, where speech is understood, and the various regions that controlled movement on the right side of her body, had been inexorably altered.
Superficial— [soo-per-fish-uh-l] of or relating to the surface, frivolous, cursory, apparent rather than real.
There was a metal plate in her head. The scar over her ear was the size and width of her index finger.
Sam’s memory of that day remained fragmented. She was certain of only a few things. She remembered the mess that Charlie had made in the bathroom. She remembered the Culpepper brothers, the smell of them, the almost tangible taste of their menace. She did not remember witnessing Gamma’s death. She did not remember what steps she took to crawl out of the grave. She remembered Charlie urinating on herself. She remembered yelling at Zachariah Culpepper. She remembered her raw, aching need that Charlie should run, that she should be safe, that she should live no matter the cost to Sam.
Physical therapy. Occupational therapy. Speech therapy. Cognitive therapy. Talk therapy. Aqua therapy. Sam had to learn how to talk again. To think again. To make connections again. To converse. To write. To read. To comprehend. To dress herself. To accept what had happened to her. To acknowledge that things were different. To learn how to study again. To return to school again. To articulate her thought processes again. To understand rhetoric and logic and motion, function and form.
Sam often compared her first year of recovery to a record on an old turntable. She awoke at the hospital with everything playing at the wrong speed. Her words slurred. Her thoughts moved as if through cake batter. Working her way back to 33 1/3rd seemed impossible. No one believed she could do it. Her age, they all felt, could be the magic component. As one of her surgeons had told her, if you were going to be shot in the head, it was good to have it happen when you were fifteen years old.
Sam felt a nudge at her arm. Count Fosco, the cat, was finished with breakfast and wanted attention. She scratched his ears, listening to his soothing purr, and wondered if she was better off forgoing the meditation and simply adopting more cats.
She put on her glasses. She went back to the kitchen and turned on the kettle. The sun was tilting across the lower end of Manhattan. She closed her eyes and let the warmth bathe her. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that Fosco was doing the same. He seemed to love the radiant heat under the kitchen floor. Sam couldn’t get used to the sudden feeling of warmth on her bare feet when she woke in the morning. The new apartment had modern bells and whistles that her last apartment had not.
Which was the reason for the new apartment—that nothing about it reminded her of the old.
The kettle whistled. She poured her mug of tea. She set the egg timer to three and a half minutes in order for the leaves to steep. She got yogurt from the fridge and mixed in granola with a spoon from the drawer. She took off her regular glasses and put on her reading glasses; her eyes had never been able to adjust to multifocal lenses.
Sam turned on her phone.
There were several work emails, a few birthday greetings from friends, but Sam scrolled down until she found the expected birthday missive from Ben Bernard, her sister’s husband. They had met once a very long time ago. The two would probably not recognize each other in the street, but Ben had an endearing sense of responsibility toward Charlie, that he would do for his wife what she could not herself.
Sam smiled at Ben’s message, a photo of Mr. Spock giving a Vulcan salute, with the words: Logic dictates that I should wish you a happy birthday.
Sam had only once returned an email from Ben, on 9/11, to let him know that she was safe.
The egg timer buzzed. She poured some milk into her hot tea, then sat back at the counter.
Sam pulled a notepad and pen from her briefcase. She tackled the work emails, answering some, forwarding others, making follow-up notes, and worked until her tea was cold and the yogurt and granola were gone.
Fosco jumped onto the counter to inspect the bowl.
Sam looked at the time. She should take her shower and go into the office.
She looked down at her phone. She tapped her fingers on the counter.
She swiped over to the screen for voicemails.
Another anticipated birthday missive.
Sam had not seen her father face to face in over twenty years. They had stopped talking when Sam was in law school. There had been no argument or official break between them, but one day, Sam was the good daughter who called her father once or twice a month, and the next day, she was not.
Initially, Rusty had tried to reach out to her, and when Sam did not reach back, he had started calling during her class hours to leave phone messages at her dorm. He wasn’t overly intrusive. If Sam happened to be in, he did not ask to speak with her. He never asked her to call him back. The relayed messages said that he was there if she needed him, or that he had been thinking about her, or he had thought to check in. During the ensuing years, he had called reliably on the second Friday of every month and on her birthday.
When Sam had moved to Portland to work in the district attorney’s office, he had left messages at her office on the second Friday of every month and on her birthday.
When she had moved to New York to start her career in patent law, he had left messages at her office on the second Friday of every month and on her birthday.
Then there was suddenly such a thing as mobile phones, and on the second Friday of every month and on her birthday, Rusty had left voicemails on Sam’s flip phone, then her Razr, then her Nokia, then her BlackBerry, and now it was her iPhone that told Sam that her father had called at 5:32 this morning, on her birthday.
Sam could predict the pattern of his call if not the exact content. Rusty had developed a peculiar formula over the years. He would start with the usual ebullient greeting, render a weather report because, for unknowable reasons, he felt the weather in Pikeville mattered, then he would add a strange detail about the occasion of his call—the day of her birth, that particular second Friday on which he was reaching out—and then a non sequitur in lieu of a farewell.
There had been a time when Sam scowled at Rusty’s name on a pink while-you-were-away message, deleted his voicemails without a second thought, or delayed listening to them for so long that they rolled off the system.
Now, she played the message.
“Good morning, Sammy-Sam!” her father bellowed. “This is Russell T. Quinn, at your service. It is currently forty-three degrees, with winds coming out of the southwest at two miles per hour. Humidity is at thirty-nine percent. Barometric pressure is holding at thirty.” Sam shook her head in bewilderment. “I am calling you today, the very same day that, in 1536, Anne Boleyn was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, to remind you, my dear Samantha, to not lose your head on your forty-fourth birthday.” He laughed, because he always laughed at his own cleverness. Sam waited for the sign-off. “‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’”
Sam smiled. She was about to delete the voicemail when, uncharacteristically, Rusty added something new.
“Your sister sends her love.”
Sam felt her brow furrow. She scrubbed back the voicemail to listen to the last part again.
“… a bear,” Rusty said, then after a short pause, “Your sister sends her love.”
Sam doubted very seriously that Charlie had sent any such thing.
The last time she’d talked to Charlie—the last time she had even been in the same room with her—there had been a definite and immediate ending to their relationship, an understanding that there was neither the need nor the desire for either of them to talk to each other ever again.
Charlie had been in her last year at Duke. She had flown to New York to visit Sam and to interview at several white shoe firms. Sam realized at the time that her sister was not visiting her so much as treating Sam’s apartment as a free place to stay in one of the most expensive cities on earth, but almost a decade had passed since she’d seen her little sister, and Sam had been looking forward to the two of them reacquainting as adults.
The first shock of the trip was not that Charlie had brought a strange man with her, but that the strange man was her husband. Charlie had dated Ben Bernard for less than a month before legally binding herself to someone about whom she knew absolutely nothing. The decision was irresponsible and dangerous, and but for the fact that Ben was one of the most kind, most decent human beings on the planet—not to mention that he was clearly head over heels in love with Charlie—Sam would have been livid with her sister for such a stupid, impetuous act.
The second shock was that Charlie had canceled all of her interviews. She had taken the money Sam had sent to buy proper business attire and instead used it to purchase tickets to see Prince at Madison Square Garden.
This brought about the third, most fatal shock.
Charlie was planning to work with Rusty.
She had insisted that she would only be in the same building with their father, not involved in Rusty’s actual practice, but to Sam, the distinction held no difference.
Rusty took risks at work that followed him home. The people who were in his office, in the office that Charlie would soon share, were the kinds of people who burned down your house, who went to your home looking for you, and when they found out you weren’t there, murdered your mother and shot your sister and chased you through the woods with a shotgun because they wanted to rape you.
The final altercation between Sam and Charlie had not taken place immediately. They had argued in fits and starts for three long days in Charlie’s planned five-day visit.
Then on the fourth day, Sam had finally exploded.
She had always had a slow-boiling temper. It’s what had made her lash out at Zachariah Culpepper in the kitchen while her mother was lying dead a few feet away, her sister was covered in urine, and a blood-smeared shotgun was pointed directly at her face.
Subsequent to her brain injury, Sam’s temper had become almost unmanageable. There were countless studies that showed how certain types of damage to the frontal and temporal lobes could lead to impulsive, even violent, anger, but the ferocity of Sam’s rage beggared scientific explanation.
She had never hit anyone, which was a piteous victory, but she threw things, broke things, attacked even cherished objects as if she were ruled by insanity. The physical acts of destruction paled in comparison to the damage rendered by her sharp tongue. The fury would take hold, Sam’s mouth would open, and hate would spew like acid.
Now, the meditation helped smooth out her emotions.
The laps in the pool helped re-direct her anxiety into something positive.
Back then, nothing had been able to stop Sam’s venomous rage.
Charlie was spoiled. She was selfish. She was a child. She was a whore. She wanted to please her father too much. She had never loved Gamma. She had never loved Sam. She was the reason they had all been in the kitchen. She was the reason Gamma had been murdered. She had left Sam to die. She had run away then, just like she was going to run away now.
That last part, at least, had proven to be true.
Charlie and Ben had returned to Durham in the middle of the night. They had not even stopped to pack their few belongings.
Sam had apologized. Of course she had apologized. Students didn’t have voicemail or email back then, so Sam had sent a certified letter to Charlie’s off-campus apartment along with the carefully packed box of things they had left in New York.
Writing the letter was without question the hardest thing that Sam had ever done in her life. She had told her sister that she loved her, had always loved her, that she was special, that their relationship meant something. That Gamma had adored her, had cherished her. That Sam understood that Rusty needed Charlie. That Charlie needed to be needed by their father. That Charlie deserved to be happy, to enjoy her marriage, to have children—lots of children. That she was old enough to make her own decisions. That everyone was so proud of her, happy for her. That Sam would do anything if Charlie would forgive her.
“Please,” Sam had written at the end of the letter. “You have to believe me. The only thing that got me through months of agony, years of recovery, a lifetime of chronic pain, is the fact that my sacrifice, and even Gamma’s sacrifice, gave you the chance to run to safety.”
Six weeks had passed before Sam had received a letter in return.
Charlie’s response had been a single, honest, compound complex sentence. “I love you, I know that you love me, but every time we see each other, we see what happened, and neither one of us will ever move forward if we are always looking back.”
Her little sister was a lot smarter than Sam had ever given her credit for.
Sam took off her glasses. She gently rubbed her eyes. The scars on her eyelids felt like Braille beneath her fingertips. For all of her complaints about superficial, she worked very hard to mask her injuries. Not because she was embarrassed, but because other people were curious. There was no more effective conversation stopper than the words, “I was shot in the head.”
Make-up covered the pink ridges where her eyelids had been torn. A three-hundred-dollar haircut covered the scar on the side of her head. She tended to dress in flowy black pants and shirts to help camouflage any hesitation in her gait. When she spoke, she spoke clearly, and when exhaustion threatened to loosen her hold on language, she kept her own counsel. There were days that Sam needed a cane to walk, but over the years, she had learned that the only reward for physical hard work was more physical hard work. If she was late at the office and she wanted a car to take her the six blocks home, she took the car.
Today, she walked the six blocks to work with relative ease. In honor of her birthday, she’d worn a colorful scarf to brighten up her usual black. As she took a left onto Wall Street, a strong gust of wind barreled off the East River. The scarf flew behind her like a cape. Sam laughed as she tangled with the silk scarf. She wrapped it around her neck and held loosely onto the ends as she walked through her new neighborhood.
Sam had not been a resident of the area for long, but she had always loved the history, that Wall Street had been, in fact, an earthen wall meant to secure the northern boundary of New Amsterdam; that Pearl Street and Beaver Street and Stone Street were named after the wares that Dutch traders sold along the muddy lanes that spoked out from where tall, wooden sailing boats had once docked.
Seventeen years ago, when Sam had first moved to New York, she’d had her choice of law firms. In the world of patent law, her Stanford master’s in mechanical engineering carried significantly more weight than her master’s from Northwestern Law. Sam had passed both the New York bar and the patent bar on her first attempts. She was a woman in a male-dominated field that desperately needed diversity. The firms’ proffers had practically been extended on bended knee.
She had joined the first firm whose signing bonus was enough to cover the down payment on a condo in a building with an elevator and a heated pool.
The building was in Chelsea, a lovely pre-war mid-rise with high ceilings and a swimming pool in the basement that looked like a Victorian-era natatorium. Despite the rapid improvement of Sam’s finances over the years, she had happily lived in the cramped, two-bedroom apartment until her husband had died.
“Happy birthday.” Eldrin, her assistant, was waiting outside the elevator when the doors opened. Sam’s routine was so fixed that he could predict her movements down to the second.
“Thank you.” She let him take her briefcase, but not her purse.
He walked with her through the offices, doling out her schedule as he always did. “Your UXH meeting is at ten thirty in conference room six. You’ve got a phone call with Atlanta at three, but I told Laurens you have a hard out at five for a very important meeting.”
Sam smiled. She had birthday drinks scheduled with a friend.
He said, “There’s a bit of an urgent detail about the partner meeting next week. You need to nail down a point for them. I left the packet on your desk.”
“Thank you.” Sam stopped at the office kitchen. She didn’t expect Eldrin to fetch her tea every morning, but because of their routine, he’d been relegated to watching Sam prepare it.
She said, “I had an email from Curtis this morning.” She pulled a tea sachet from the tin on the counter. “I want to be in Atlanta next week for the Coca-Cola deposition.” Among other locales, Stehlik, Elton, Mallory and Sanders had satellite offices in Atlanta. Sam made monthly trips to the city, staying at the Four Seasons, walking the two blocks to the Peachtree Street offices, and ignoring the fact that Pikeville was a two-hour drive up the interstate.
“I’ll let travel know.” Eldrin retrieved a carton of milk from the refrigerator. “I can also ask if Grainger has—oh, no.” He was looking at the muted television in the corner. A graphic spun ominously onto the screen. SCHOOL SHOOTING.
As a victim of gun violence, Sam had always felt a particular horror when she learned of a mass shooting, but like most Americans, she had become somewhat acclimated to their almost monthly occurrence.
The screen showed a little girl’s photograph, obviously from a school yearbook. The name underneath read LUCY ALEXANDER.
Sam added milk to the tea. “I dated a boy in school named Peter Alexander.”
Eldrin raised his eyebrows as he followed her out of the kitchen. She wasn’t usually easy with details about her personal life.
Sam continued toward her office. Eldrin continued the rundown of the day’s itinerary, but she only listened with half an ear. She hadn’t thought about Peter Alexander in a long while. He had been a moody boy, given to long, tedious speeches about the torture inherent in being an artist. Sam had let him touch her breasts, but only because she had wanted to know what it felt like.
It felt sweaty, frankly, because Peter had no idea what he was doing.
Sam dropped her purse by her desk, a glass and steel chunk that anchored her sun-filled corner office. Her view, like most views in the Financial District, was the building directly across the way. There had been no rules regarding set-back when the Canyons of Wall Street had been erected. Twenty feet of sidewalk was all that separated most buildings from the street.
Eldrin finished his spiel as she placed her tea on a coaster beside her computer.
Sam waited for him to leave. She sat down in her chair. She found her reading glasses in her briefcase. She began the review of her notes for the ten thirty meeting.
Sam had understood when she decided on patent law as a career that the job was basically one of trying to sway the transfer of large sums of money: one incredibly wealthy corporation sued another incredibly wealthy corporation for using a similar set of stripes on their new athletic shoes, or co-opting a particular color from their brand, and very expensive lawyers had to argue in front of very bored judges about the percentages of cyan in a certain Pantone.
Long gone were the days of Newton and Leibniz battling for the right to be identified as the inventor of calculus. Most of Sam’s time was spent combing through the minutiae of design schematics and referencing patent applications that sometimes reached back to the early days of the industrial revolution.
She loved every single second of it.
She loved the melding of science and law, delighted in the fact that she had somehow managed to distill the single best parts of her mother and father into a rewarding life.
Eldrin knocked on her glass door. “I wanted to update you. Looks like that school shooting took place in North Georgia.”
Sam nodded. “North Georgia” was a nebulous catch-all for any area outside of Atlanta. “Do they know how many victims?”
“Only two.”
“Thanks.” Sam tried not to dwell on the “only,” because Eldrin was correct that two was a low body count. The story would probably roll off the news by tomorrow.
She turned to her computer. She pulled up a rough draft of a brief that she wanted to be conversant with for her ten thirty meeting. A second-year associate had taken a stab at a response to a summary motion made in the case of SaniLady, a division of UXH Financial Holdings, Ltd. v. LadyMate Corp, a division of Nippon Development Resources, Inc.
After six years of back and forth, two failed mediations and a screaming match that took place mostly in Japanese, the case was going to trial.
At issue was the design of a hinge that controlled the movement of the self-closing lid on a partition-mounted public restroom sanitary napkin and tampon disposal bin. The LadyMate Corporation produced several iterations of the ubiquitous container, from the FemyGeni to the original LadyMate to the strangely named Tough Guy.
Sam was the only person involved in the entire case who had actually used one of these bins. If she had been consulted during their design, she would’ve gone for truth in advertising and called them all the Motherfucker, because that was usually the first thing that came into a woman’s mind when she had to use one.
Sam also would have designed the spring-loaded piano hinge as two components for the extra .03 cent manufacturing cost rather than risk a single, integrated hinge that invited a patent infringement lawsuit that would result in millions of dollars in legal fees, not to mention the damages if Nippon lost the case.
If the brief on her computer had anything to do with it, UXH would not be seeing those damages. Patent law wasn’t the most baroque area of litigation, but the second-year associate who had drafted the brief wrote with the adroitness of a piece of sandpaper.
This was why Sam had taken a three-year detour into the Portland district attorney’s office. She had wanted to be able to speak the language of a courtroom.
Sam scrolled through the document, making notes, rewriting a long passage in an approximation of simple English, adding a modicum of flourish to the end because she knew that it would perturb her opposing counsel, a man who had, upon his first meeting with Sam, told her to fetch him a coffee, two sugars, and tell her boss that he did not like to wait.
Gamma had been right about so many things. Sam Quinn was given far more respect than Samantha Quinn could have ever hoped for.
At exactly ten thirty-four, Sam was the last person to enter the conference room. The tardiness was by design. She did not relish chastising stragglers.
She took her seat at the head of the table. She looked out at the sea of young, white men whose degrees from Michigan and Harvard and MIT gave them a bloated sense of their own self-importance. Or perhaps the bloat was warranted. They were sitting in the gleaming, glass-lined offices of one of the most important patent firms in the world. If they thought that they were captains of industry, it was likely because they soon would be.
But for now, they had to prove themselves to Sam. She listened to their updates, commented on their proposed strategies, and generally let them toss ideas back and forth until she felt that they were biting their own tails. Sam was notorious for running lean meetings. She asked for case law to be researched, a rewriting of briefs to be completed by tomorrow, the incorporation of a certain patent application from the 1960s to be integrated more deeply into their work product.
She stood from her chair, so everyone else did. She made an anodyne comment about looking forward to their results as she left the conference room.
They followed her, keeping their distance, because they all worked on the same side of the building. Sam often felt like the long walk back to her office was akin to being stalked by a pack of geese. Invariably, one would push ahead, hoping to make his name known, or to prove to the others that he wasn’t afraid of her. A few peeled off for other meetings, wishing her happy birthday. Someone asked if she had enjoyed her recent trip to Europe. Another young man, a bit over-eager since word had spread that Sam would soon become a named partner, followed her all the way to her office door, relaying a long story that ended with the detail that his grandmother had been born in Denmark.
Sam’s husband had been born in Denmark.
Anton Mikkelsen was twenty-one years Sam’s senior, a professor at Stanford from whom she had taken a Technology in Society course entitled Engineering the Roman Empire Design. Anton’s passion for the subject had captivated Sam. She had always been drawn to people who were delighted by the world, who looked out rather than in.
For his part, Anton had been completely hands-off while Sam was his student, aloof even, so that she was convinced she had done something wrong. It wasn’t until after she had graduated, when she was in her second year at Northwestern, that Anton had reached out.
At Stanford, Sam had been one of only a handful of women studying in a male-dominated field. She had infrequently received emails from some of her professors. The subject lines tended to show a combination of desperation and a loose understanding of ellipsis: “I can’t get you out of my mind …” or, “… You have to … help me …” As if they were being driven mad by their desire and only Sam could alleviate the pain. Their collective insecurities had been one of the reasons she had applied to law school rather than pursue her Ph.D. The thought of any one of these pathetic, middle-aged lotharios being in charge of her thesis was untenable.
Anton had been well aware of his colleagues’ reputations when he first emailed Sam.
“I apologize if you find this contact unwanted,” he had written. “I waited three years to ensure that my professional authority has no overlap with, nor impact upon, your chosen field.”
He had retired early from Stanford. He had taken a job as a consultant for an overseas engineering firm. He had established his home base in New York so that he could be closer to her. They had married four years after Sam was named an associate at the firm.
Anton had opened up her life in ways that Sam had never fathomed.
Their first trip abroad was magical. Except for an ill-considered freshman jaunt to Tijuana, Sam had never before been outside of the United States. Anton had taken her to Ireland, where as a boy he had summered with his mother’s people. To Denmark, where he had learned to love design. To Rome to show her the ruins, to Florence to show her the Duomo, to Venice to show her love.
They had traveled extensively throughout their marriage, Anton taking jobs or Sam attending a conference with the sole purpose of being somewhere new. Dubai. Australia. Brazil. Singapore. Bora Bora. Every new country, every new foreign city that Sam set foot in, she thought of Gamma, the way her mother had urged Sam to leave, to see the world, to live anywhere but Pikeville.
That Sam had done this with a man whom she adored made each journey that much more rewarding.
Sam’s office phone rang.
She sat back in her chair. She glanced at the time. Her three o’clock call from Atlanta. She had lost herself in work again, skipping lunch, inexorably lost in a patent design for a narrow plated pintle hinge.
Laurens Van Loon was Dutch, living in Atlanta, and their in-house specialist on international patent law. He was calling about the UXH case, but like Sam, he was an enthusiastic traveler. Before they talked shop, he wanted to know all about the trip she had taken a few weeks ago, a ten-day tour through Italy and Ireland.
There had been a time in Sam’s life when she talked about foreign cities in terms of their culture, the architecture, the people, but money and the passage of time had made her more likely to talk about the hotels.
She told Laurens about her stay at the Merrion in Dublin, how the garden suite did not overlook a garden, but a rear alley. That the Aman on the Grand Canal was breathtaking, the service impeccable, the little courtyard where she drank her tea every morning one of the most tranquil spots in the city. In Florence there was the Westin Excelsior, which had a magnificent view of the Arno, but the noise from the roof-top bar had occasionally echoed down into her suite. In Rome, she told Laurens, she had stayed at the Cavalieri, for their baths and beautiful pools.
This last part was a lie.
Sam had booked a room at the Raffaello, because the budget hotel was the only place that she and Anton could afford during that first magical trip to Rome.
For Laurens’s benefit, Sam continued to prevaricate, recommending restaurants and museums from past journeys. She did not tell him that in Dublin, she had stood in the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College, looking up at the beautiful barrel-vaulted ceiling with tears in her eyes. Nor did Sam relay that in Florence, she had sat on one of the many benches inside the Galleria dell’Accademia, where Michelangelo’s David was displayed, and sobbed.
Rome had been filled with equal parts nostalgia and grief. The Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Piazza Navona where Anton had proposed to her while they drank wine under the moonlight.
Sam had first seen all of these wonderful sites with her husband, and now that Anton was dead, she would never see them with the same pleasure again.
“Your trip sounds amazing,” Laurens said. “Ireland and Italy. So, that’s the ‘I’ countries, though I suppose you technically should have included India.”
“Iceland, Indonesia, Israel …” Sam smiled at his laughter. “I think we should probably stop discussing hotels and move onto the exciting world of sanitary napkin disposal.”
“Yes, of course,” Laurens said. “But may I ask you—I hope this is not intrusive?”
Sam braced herself for a question about Anton, because even a year later, people asked.
“This school shooting,” Laurens said.
Sam felt ashamed that she had forgotten about it. “Is this a bad time to speak?”
“No, no. Of course it’s terrible. But I saw this man on television. Russell Quinn, the attorney who is representing the suspect.”
Sam gripped the receiver so tightly that a tremor developed in her thumb. She had not connected the dots, but Rusty volunteering to defend someone who had shot and killed two people inside of a school should not have come as a surprise.
Laurens said, “I know that you’re from Georgia, so I wondered if there was a relation.” He added, “It seems this man is quite the liberal champion.”
Sam was at a loss for words. She finally managed, “It’s a common name.”
“It is?” Laurens was always eager to learn more about his adopted city.
“Yes. From before the Civil War.” Sam shook her head, because she could have come up with a better lie. All that she could do now was move on. “So, I heard from UXH’s in-house people that Nippon is about to have a shake-up in their corner suites.”
Laurens hesitated slightly before changing the conversation to work. Sam listened to him run down the rumors he had heard, but her attention strayed to her computer.
She opened the New York Times website. Lucy Alexander. The shooting had taken place at Pikeville Middle School.
Sam’s middle school.
She studied the child’s face, looking for a familiar shape of the eye, a curve of the lip, that might remind her of Peter Alexander, but she found nothing. Still, Pikeville was a very small town. The odds were strong that the girl was somehow related to Sam’s former beau.
She scanned down the article for details about the shooting. An eighteen-year-old girl had brought a weapon to school. She had started shooting right before the first bell. The gun was wrested away by an unnamed teacher, a highly decorated former Marine who now taught history to teenagers.
Sam scrolled down to another photo, this one of the second victim.
Douglas Pinkman.
The phone slipped from Sam’s hand. She had to retrieve it from the floor. “I’m sorry,” she told Laurens, her voice somewhat unsteady. “Could we follow up on this tomorrow?”
Sam barely registered his consent. She could only stare at the photograph.
During her tenure at the school, Douglas Pinkman had coached both the football and track team. He had been Sam’s earliest champion, a man who believed that if she trained hard enough, pushed herself enough, she could win a scholarship to the college of her choice. Sam had known that her intellect could get her that and more, but she had been intrigued by the prospect of her body working at the same efficient levels as her mind. Running, too, was something that she really enjoyed. The open air. The sweat. The release of endorphins. The solitude.
And now, Sam was forced to use a cane on her bad days and Mr. Pinkman had been murdered outside his school office.
She scrolled down, searching for more details. Shot twice in the chest with hollow-point bullets. Pinkman’s death, anonymous sources reported, was instantaneous.
Sam clicked open the Huffington Post, knowing they would give more attention to the story than the Times. The entire front page was dedicated to the shooting. The banner read TRAGEDY IN NORTH GEORGIA. Photos of Lucy Alexander and Douglas Pinkman were placed side by side.
Sam skimmed the hyperlinks:
HERO MARINE PREFERS TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS
ATTORNEY FOR SUSPECT RELEASES STATEMENT
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN: A TIMELINE OF THE SHOOTING
PINKMAN WIFE WATCHED HUSBAND DIE
Sam did not want to see the attorney for the suspect. She clicked on the last link.
Her lips parted in surprise.
Mr. Pinkman had married Judith Heller.
What a strange world.
Sam had never met Miss Heller in person, but of course she knew the woman’s name. After Daniel Culpepper had shot Sam, after Zachariah had tried and failed to rape Charlie, Charlie had run to the Heller farm for help. While Miss Heller took care of her, the woman’s elderly father had sat on the front porch, armed to the teeth, in case one of the Culpeppers showed up before the police did.
For obvious reasons, Sam had only learned these details much later. Even during the first month of her recovery, she could not retain the sequence of events. She had vague memories of Charlie sitting on her hospital bed repeating the story of their survival over and over again because Sam’s short-term memory was a sieve. Her eyes were still bandaged. She was blind, helpless. She would reach out for Charlie’s hand, slowly identify her voice, and continually ask the same questions.
Where am I? What happened? Why isn’t Gamma here?
Each time, dozens, perhaps over one hundred times, Charlie had answered.
You are in the hospital. You were shot in the head. Gamma was murdered.
Then Sam would fall asleep, or a certain number of minutes would pass, and she would reach out for Charlie, asking her again—
Where am I? What happened? Why isn’t Gamma here?
Gamma is dead. You are alive. Everything is going to be okay.
Sam had not considered for many years the emotional consequences of her thirteen-year-old sister having to tell and retell their story. She did know that after a while, Charlie’s tears had stopped. The emotion had abated, or at least managed to conceal itself. While Charlie exhibited no reluctance to talk about the events, she had begun to relay them at a remove. Not exactly as if everything had happened to someone else, but as if she wanted to make it clear that the tragedy had lost its grip on her.
The affect came across most clearly in the trial transcripts. At various times in Sam’s life, she had read the twelve hundred fifty-eight page document as an exercise in memory. This happened to me, then this happened to me, then this is how I managed to live.
Charlie’s testimony during the prosecutor’s examination was dry, more like a reporter narrating a story. This happened to Gamma. This happened to Sam. This is what Zachariah Culpepper tried to do. This is what Miss Heller said when she opened her back door.
Fortunately, Judith Heller’s testimony served to color between some of Charlie’s stark lines. On the stand, the woman had described her shock when she’d found a blood-covered, terrified little girl standing on her porch. Charlie had been shaking so hard that at first she could not speak. When she was finally inside, finally able to form words with her mouth, inexplicably, she had asked for a bowl of ice cream.
Miss Heller had not known what to do but comply while her father called the police. Nor did she know that the ice cream would make Charlie sick. She had served two bowls before Charlie ran to the toilet. It was only through the closed bathroom door that Charlie had told Miss Heller that she thought that her mother and sister were dead.
A loud squawking distracted Sam from her thoughts.
Laurens had hung up minutes ago, but Sam was still holding the phone. She put down the receiver. Her hand lingered.
Consider the etymology of the phrase “hang up the phone.”
The Huffington Post page automatically reloaded. The Alexander family was giving a live news conference.
Sam turned the sound down low. She watched the video. A man named Rick Fahey spoke on behalf of the family. She listened to his pleas for privacy, knowing they would fall on deaf ears. Sam supposed the one silver lining of being in a coma was that after being shot, she did not have to listen to endless speculation about her case on the news.
On the video, Fahey stared directly at the camera. He said, “That’s what Kelly Wilson is. A cold-blooded murderer.”
Fahey’s head turned. He exchanged a look with a man who could only be Ken Coin. Instead of his ill-fitting police uniform, Coin was wearing a shiny, navy blue suit. Sam knew that he was the current district attorney for Pikeville, but she wasn’t sure where she had obtained that information.
Regardless, the look between the two men confirmed the obvious, that this was going to be a death penalty case. That explained Rusty’s involvement. He had long been a vocal opponent of the death penalty. As a defense attorney, as someone who had been instrumental in the exonerations of convicted men, he believed that the chance for mistake was too high.
From the Culpepper trial transcripts, Sam knew that her father had spoken from the stand for almost a full hour, delivering a moving, impassioned plea to spare Zachariah Culpepper on the grounds that the state had no moral authority to take a life.
Charlie had argued just as forcefully for death.
Sam had fallen somewhere in the middle. She was at that point unable to clearly verbalize her thoughts. Her letter to the court had requested life in prison for Zachariah Culpepper. This was not a show of compassion. At the time, Sam was a resident of the Shepherd Spinal Center in Atlanta. The people who assisted her through the arduous months of recovery were professional and compassionate, but Sam had felt like a rabbit trapped in a snare.
She could not get in or out of bed without assistance.
She could not use the toilet without assistance.
She could not leave her room without assistance.
She could not eat when she wanted to eat, or consume what she wanted to eat.
Because her fingers could not navigate a button or zip, she could not wear the clothes that she wanted to wear.
Because she could not lace her sneakers, she was forced to wear ugly, Velcroed orthopedic shoes.
Washing herself, brushing her teeth, combing her hair, taking a walk, going outside into the sunlight or the rain, were all done at someone else’s pleasure.
Rusty, citing his high moral principles, had wanted the judge to give Zachariah Culpepper life in prison. Charlie, burning with a need for revenge, had wanted a sentence of death. Sam had asked that Zachariah Culpepper be sentenced to a long, wretched existence, deprived of any sense of self-determination, because she had learned first hand exactly what it felt like to be a prisoner.
Maybe they had all gotten their wish. Because of appeals and temporary reprieves and legal maneuverings, Zachariah Culpepper was currently one of the longest-serving inmates on Georgia’s death row.
He continued to profess his innocence to anyone who would listen. He continued to claim that Charlie and Sam had colluded to frame him and his brother because he owed Rusty several thousand dollars in legal bills.
In retrospect, Sam should have argued for death.
She closed the browser on her computer.
She opened a blank email and sent apologies to her friend, begging off their birthday drinks tonight. She told Eldrin to hold her calls. She put on her reading glasses.
She returned her attention to the narrow plated pintle hinge.
When Sam looked up from her computer, darkness had turned her windows black. Eldrin was gone. The office was quiet. Not for the first time, she was alone on the floor.
She had also sat too long without moving. She performed some seated stretches. Her body was stiff, but eventually, determinedly, she was able to stand. She unfolded the collapsible cane she kept in her bottom desk drawer. She wrapped her scarf around her neck. She considered calling a car, but by the time one showed up, she could walk the six blocks home.
She regretted the decision the moment she stepped outside.
The wind off the river was cutting. Sam gripped the scarf in one hand. Her other hand held tight to the cane. Her briefcase and purse weighed down the crook of her arm. She should have waited for the car. She should have had drinks with her friend. She should have done a lot of things differently today.
The night doorman wished Sam happy birthday as she entered her building. She stopped to thank him, to ask after his children, but her leg ached too much to stand.
She rode up in the elevator alone.
She stared at her reflection in the back of the doors.
A solitary, white-haired figure stared back.
The doors slid open. Fosco rolled and stretched on the floor as Sam walked into the kitchen. She made herself eat some leftover Thai from Saturday night’s birthday dinner party. The barstool was uncomfortable. She sat on the edge, both feet on the floor. Pain spread up the side of her leg like a hot blade splaying open the muscle.
She looked at the clock. Too early to go to bed. Too tired to concentrate on work. Too exhausted to read the new book she had received as a birthday present.
At her old apartment in Chelsea, she and Anton had eschewed television-watching. Sam stared at screens all day. There was only so much blue light that her eyes could take before a headache began to gnaw behind her eyes.
The new apartment had come with a large television already installed in the den. Sam had often found herself drawn to the dark room, one of those windowless boxes that builders called bonus spaces because they could not legally call them bedrooms.
Sam sat down on the couch. She placed an empty wine glass on the coffee table. Beside this, she put a bottle of 2011 Tenuta Poggio San Nicolò.
Anton’s favorite wine.
Fosco jumped into her lap. Sam absently scratched between his ears. She studied the elegant label on the wine bottle, the delicate scrollwork around the border, the simple red wax seal at the center.
The liquid inside might as well be poison.
Sam believed that it was wines like the San Nicolò that had killed her husband.
As Anton’s consultancy business had expanded, as Sam’s practice had grown, they were able to afford better things. Five-star hotels. First-class flights. Suites. Private tours. Fine dining. One of Anton’s lifelong passions was wine. He loved enjoying a glass at lunch, another glass, perhaps two, with dinner. The dry reds were his particular favorite. Occasionally, when Sam wasn’t around, he would accompany the drink with a cigar.
Anton’s doctors pointed to fate and perhaps the cigars, but Sam thought the high levels of tannin in the wines had killed him.
Esophageal cancer.
Less than two percent of all cancers were of this kind.
Tannin, a naturally occurring astringent, lends certain plants a defense against insects and predators. The chemical compound can be found in many fruits, berries and legumes. There are several real-world applications for tannoids. Vegetable and synthetic tannins are employed in leather-making. The pharmaceutical world frequently uses tannate salts in the production of antihistamines and antitussive medications.
In red wine, tannin acts as a structural component, a reaction from the skin of the grape making contact with the pips. Wines with higher levels of tannins age better than ones with lower levels, thus the more mature, the more expensive, the bottle, the higher the concentration of tannins.
Tannin also occurs naturally in tea, but the coagulating power can be neutralized by the proteins found in milk.
To Sam’s thinking, proteins and tannins were at the crux of Anton’s illness; particularly histatins, which are salivary proteins secreted by glands in the back of the tongue. The fluid contains antimicrobial and antifungal properties, but also plays a key role in wound closure.
This last function is perhaps the most vital. Cancer, after all, is the result of abnormal cell growth. If histatins don’t protect and repair the tissues lining the esophagus, then the DNA of the cells can become altered, and abnormal growth can begin.
Tannins are known to suppress the production of histatins in the mouth.
Every toast Anton made, every salut, had contributed to the malignancy growing inside the tissues lining his esophagus, spreading to his lymph nodes and finally into his organs.
At least that was Sam’s theory. As she had watched her beautiful, vibrant husband wither away over the course of two long years, she had clung to what appeared to be a tangible explanation—an x that had caused y. Anton had tested negative for oral HPV, a viral infection linked to roughly seventy percent of cancers of the head and neck. He was only an occasional smoker. He was not an alcoholic. There was no history of cancer in his immediate family.
Ergo, tannins.
To accept that fate had played any role in his sickness, that lightning had struck Sam not twice but three times, was beyond her intellectual and emotional capacity.
Fosco pressed his head into Sam’s arm. He had been Anton’s cat. There was likely some sort of Pavlovian reaction to the scent of the wine.
Sam gently set him aside as she moved to the edge of the couch. She poured a glass of wine that she would not drink for her husband that she could not see.
Then, she did what she had been avoiding since three this afternoon.
She turned on the television.
The woman who Sam would always think of as Miss Heller was standing outside the front entrance to the Dickerson County Hospital. Understandably, she looked devastated. Her long blondish gray hair was untamed, tendrils blowing wild in the wind. Her eyes were bloodshot. The thin line of her lips was almost the same color as her skin.
She said, “The tragedy of today cannot be erased by the death of another young woman.” She stopped. Her lips pressed together. Sam heard cameras clicking, reporters clearing their throats. Mrs. Pinkman’s voice remained strong. “I pray for the Alexander family. I pray for my husband’s soul. For my own salvation.” Again, she pressed together her lips. Tears glistened in her eyes. “But I also pray for the Wilson family. Because they have suffered today as much as any of us have suffered.” She looked directly into the camera, shoulders squared. “I forgive Kelly Wilson. I absolve her of this horrible tragedy. As Matthew says, ‘for if you forgive other people who have sinned against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you your sins.’”
The woman turned and walked back into the hospital. Guards blocked the doors to keep reporters from following her.
Sam let out a breath that had been held deep inside her chest.
The anchor came back onscreen. He was sitting at a desk with a panel of self-styled experts. Their words floated over Sam’s head as she pulled Fosco back into her lap.
A British friend of Sam’s had claimed that England had lost its stiff upper lip the day that Princess Diana had died. Overnight, a culture given to wry comments in lieu of emotion had turned into a weepy mess. The friend called this phenomenon yet another unwelcome Americanization—the Brits were constantly complaining about America, even as they greedily consumed American products and culture—and said that the public outpouring of grief over Diana’s death had forever altered the way that his people could acceptably respond to tragedy.
There was probably some truth to his theory, even the part about blaming America, but Sam believed the worst result of these seemingly unrelenting national tragedies was that a formula for recovery had emerged. The Boston Marathon attacks. San Bernardino. The Pulse Nightclub.
People were outraged. They were glued to their televisions, to their web pages, to their Facebook feeds. They vocally expressed sorrow, horror, fury, pain. They cried for change. They raised money. They demanded action.
And then they went back to their lives until the next one happened again.
Sam’s eyes flicked back to the television. The news anchor said, “We’re going to show the video from before. For viewers who are just tuning in, this is a re-enactment of the events that took place this morning in Pikeville, which is roughly two hours north of Atlanta.”
Sam watched the crude drawings awkwardly move across the screen—more of a simulation than a re-enactment.
The anchor began, “At approximately six fifty-five this morning, the alleged shooter, Kelly Rene Wilson, walked into the hallway.”
Sam watched the figure move to the center of the hallway.
A door opened. An old woman ducked as two bullets were fired.
Sam closed her eyes, but she listened.
Mr. Pinkman is shot. Lucy Alexander is shot. Two more figures enter the frame. Neither is identified by name. One male, the other female. The woman runs to Lucy Alexander. The man struggles with Kelly Wilson for the gun.
Sam opened her eyes. There was a bead of sweat on her forehead. She had gripped her hands so tightly that half-moon indentations cut into her palms.
Her cell phone started to ring. From the kitchen. Inside her purse.
Sam did not move. She watched the television. The anchor was interviewing a bald man whose bow tie indicated he was likely involved in the psychiatric profession.
He said, “Generally, you find that these types of shooters are loners. They feel alienated, unloved. Often, they are bullied.”
Her phone stopped ringing.
Bow Tie continued, “The fact that the murderer in this instance is a woman—”
Sam turned off the television. The room faded to pitch-black, but she was used to maneuvering through the darkness. She checked to make sure Fosco was sleeping beside her. She tentatively reached out for the wine bottle and glass and took them into the kitchen, where the contents of both went down the sink.
Sam checked her phone. The call had come from an unknown number. Likely a telesalesman, though she’d had her number added to the do-not-call registry. Sam used her thumb to navigate the screens and block the number.
The phone vibrated in her hand, announcing a new email. She looked at the time. Hong Kong was open for business. If there was one constant in Sam’s life, it was the steady, unrelenting volume of work to be done.
She didn’t want to commit to retrieving her reading glasses unless there was an urgent message. She squinted, skimming down the list of new mails.
She left them all unopened.
Sam put the phone on the counter. She went about her nightly routine. She made sure all of Fosco’s water bowls were full. She turned off the lights, pressed the appropriate buttons to close the blinds, checked to make certain that the alarm had been set.
She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. She took her nightly regimen of pills. In the closet, she changed into her pajamas. There was a very good novel on her bedside table, but Sam was eager to rest, to put the day behind her, to wake up tomorrow with a fresh perspective.
She climbed into bed. Fosco appeared from nowhere. He took his place on the pillow next to her head. She took off her glasses. She turned off the light. She closed her eyes.
Sam hissed out a low, steady stream of breath.
Slowly, she went through her nightly exercises, engaging, then releasing every muscle in her body, from the flexor digitorum brevis in her feet to the galea aponeurotica beneath her scalp.
She waited for her body to relax, for sleep to come, but there was a pronounced lack of cooperation. The silence in the room was too complete. Even Fosco was absent his usual sighs and licks and snores.
Sam’s eyes opened.
She stared up at the ceiling, waited for the darkness to turn to gray, the gray to give way to shadows cast by the tiny edge of light that always sneaked between the blinds on the windows.
“Can you see?” Charlie had asked. “Sam, can you see?”
“Yes,” Sam had lied. She could feel the freshly planted soil beneath her bare feet. Every step away from the farmhouse, away from the light, added one more layer of darkness. Charlie was a blob of gray. Daniel was tall and skinny, like a charcoal pencil. Zachariah Culpepper was a menacing black square of hate.
Sam sat up, swiveled her legs over the side of the bed. She pressed her hands into her thighs, working the stiff muscles. The radiant heat in the floor warmed the soles of her feet.
She could feel her heart beating. Slow and steady. The sinoatrial node, the atrioventricular node, the His-Purkinje network of fibers that sent impulses to the muscular walls of the ventricles, making them alternately contract and relax.
Sam stood up. She went back into the kitchen. She got her reading glasses out of her briefcase. She held her phone in her hand.
She opened the new email from Ben.
Charlie needs you.