Love and Chaos (36 page)

Then a town car pulls up in front of us, and Pete opens the door for me. It’s the same town car that Sam picked me up in at the playground in the rain that night. Of course. Pete has a permanent driver. This is Roger Rutherford’s son, after all.

“Um, so, why do you live in Brooklyn?” I ask Pete, after giving the driver directions. “You do something finance-y, I’m guessing, a banker or something, so how come—”

“How come I don’t live in Manhattan with all the other bankers?” he says, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t judge a book by its cover, Angie.”

“You’re a book?”

Another death stare. Wow, Sam’s brother is an arrogant fucker. Sam isn’t exactly lacking in confidence, either, but somehow … somehow with him, it’s an open, warm self-assurance. He’s kind. And sexy. And funny and silly and gorgeous and everything I want and need and love.…

God, I miss him. I hope we can find him. I hope he hasn’t just flown to some Caribbean island to get lost for another three years.

I stare out the window, trying to collect myself. I feel kind of panicky and wired. I was so nervous on the way up to the apartment in the elevator, all that adrenaline is still pulsing around my body, and this situation is so bizarre.

Then a new thought occurs to me.

What if he doesn’t even want to see me?

I clear my throat. “Look, I don’t know if I should come with you, okay? I don’t know if Sam wants to see me. We kind of had a fight.”

“I know,” Pete says, flicking some fluff off his knee.

“You know?” I’m suddenly tired of Pete’s clipped arrogance. “What the fuck do you know?”

“I know my brother told you he was broke because he didn’t want to deal with all the inevitable Rutherford questions, and because it’s just not part of who he is right now. I know he left a job because he wanted to see you again, and I know he stuck around in New York for way longer than he wanted to, just to be near you.”

“Oh,” I say in a small voice. “I didn’t know that.”

Pete looks over, frowning. “He’s completely in love with you, Angie. Of course he wants to see you.”

“Oh,” I say again.

But inside, I’m exploding.

“Sam called in a couple of favors earlier today with a family friend who works at some fashion website. They called our father, who called me, wanting to know why I’d been keeping Sam a secret from him for the past few months.”

“Why did your dad think that you’d know he was back?”

“Sam’s my only brother, Angie. He’s my best friend. Just because we’re doing different shit doesn’t mean we’re not simpatico.”

Simpatico. What a banker word to use. Sam would never use a word like that.

“Anyway,” he continues. “We have to find Sam, now, before Rog does, and get him to leave the city.”

“Leave?”

“My dad wants to kill him, Angie.”

“You mean like…”

Pete looks over at me. “I mean like kill him.”

CHAPTER
47

“I haven’t seen him,” is the first thing Vic says when he opens his front door. If I weren’t freaking out right now, I’d laugh: Vic is a terrible liar.

“I don’t believe you,” says Pete.

“I don’t care.” Vic tilts his head so that the few inches of height difference between them looks like a lot more. He looks at me. “You should know better than this.”

“Vic, it’s really important we find him,” I say. “This is Sam’s brother.”

“You’re Pete?” Vic’s face changes, just a fraction of warmth creeping in. “Okay, come on in.”

Pete and I walk into Vic’s apartment. It’s surreal being back in the room that was waist-deep in floodwater a few nights ago. There’s no furniture, the carpet has been ripped up, and there’s a muddy, chemical smell from whatever they are using to clean the place.

“I was just packing up some things. I’m going to Jersey to stay with my niece until the fix-up is finished,” says Vic. He turns around and stares at Pete for a few seconds, then gives him a little nod. “So what do you want to know?”

“Where is Sam?”

“He got a job.”

“Where?”

“Some yacht he was talking about, something going to Europe,” says Vic. “One of the crew dropped out at the last minute, Sam got the call. He stopped by first to say good-bye.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Pete asks.

Vic shrugs. “Didn’t want you to have to lie to your father.”

Well, obviously Sam never had a problem confiding in Vic.

Once we’re outside, I turn to face Pete. “Now we go to the North Cove Marina.”

“Are you sure he’s leaving from there?”

“I’d bet my life on it. No, better than that. I’d bet my job on it.”

Pete looks at me funny again. I have the feeling he thinks I’m a little nuts.

The drive over the Brooklyn Bridge is largely silent. Pete doesn’t bother to make conversation, he just keeps drumming his hands against his thighs, fidgeting, biting his thumbnail, putting the window down, then up, then down.

“Stop it! Just stop it!” I finally snap, just as we reach Manhattan. “You’re so fucking tense!”

Pete looks at me, his jaw clenched. “I need. To find. My brother.”

“You’re being a total drama queen. I need to find him, too. Your dad isn’t going to kill him.”

“Really?” Pete pauses for a very long time, staring at me, and then seems to make a decision. “Look, Angie, because of Sam, our father had to fork over more than half his money to our mother in their divorce settlement. Sam had been spying on him, taking photos of Rog, uh, playing around. Gave them to our mom.”

“So?” I say. “Your father cheated. Sam did the right thing.” I wonder if that’s what I should have done when my dad asked me to lie. Probably.

“Well it turned out she’d cheated on him, too,” snaps Pete. “She’d been having an affair for years. So, actually, Angie, Sam did the wrong thing. He judged the situation before he knew the entire story.”

“Oh.”

“Dad found out. Epic fight. It got … it got pretty bad. So Sam dropped out of college, went a little wild, then took off and didn’t come back. We’re less than a year apart in age, we’re best friends. But I only know half of what’s going on with him. Sam always does what he thinks is right.”

“Like keeping secrets from me? Even though I was supposedly the reason he came back to New York?”

“Yeah. Probably. He told me he thought he was busted one time. This guy we went to school with, Lev? He ran into him at some dinner party at your place.”

“Lev? Julia’s coworker? The guy who called Sam ‘Ruthy’ at the surprise party?”

“It’s an old school nickname,” says Pete, grinning to himself. Then he assumes his scowly-mean face again. “Anyway, thanks to you, my brother has been a fucking mess the past few days.”

“Sam lied to me.” I know I sound defensive, but I can’t help it. “I told him everything about me, about who I was, and he lied.”

“He didn’t lie to you, Angie. He just didn’t tell you everything. It’s not the same as lying. He was trying to figure out the right time.… You don’t get to know everything about everybody right away. None of us do.”

I stare at him. Maybe that’s true. I might never tell Sam or anyone else outside of Rookhaven the whole story about the Soho Grand night and everything that happened with Hal and Stef. It’s my life, it’s my past, and it belongs to me.

So by judging Sam for doing the same thing, does that make me a hypocrite?

Pete sighs. “Sam’s problem was he never thought he did the wrong thing. Ever.”

“He does now, I think.… He regrets doing that stuff,” I say, thinking back to our conversation on my bed at our sleepover. “He told me something about your parents’ divorce one time.… I think he regrets fighting with your dad.”

“He said that?”

“He said he acted like a penis. No, wait, that wasn’t it, not a penis—a dick.”

Pete laughs for the first time tonight. “Yeah, that’s pretty true.… Sam has always been the principled one, always the guy who did everything right. The ultimate good guy.” Wow. The opposite of me. “But he could be kind of a dick sometimes, too. Self-righteous. And stubborn. If he decided to do something he had a hard time going back on his word.” Okay, maybe not the total opposite of me. “What can I say? We were brought up to be arrogant.”

“I wouldn’t call him arrogant,” I say. “Self-possessed, yes. Cool under pressure.”

“I think the last three years have changed him. He used to care more about principles and less about people.”

“He cares about people now!” I suddenly want Pete to know how amazing I think Sam is. “He looked after my roommate, Coco, and Vic, and, um, and me.…” A tear-lump swells in my throat and I can’t say anything else. He did look after me. And I had stupid tantrums about romance novels and ignored his calls and sulked when he asked Julia out, and he still looked after me. He loved me.

Pete’s too wrapped up in his own world to notice my tears. “Well, now he wants to start somewhere with nothing and end up sailing across the world.” While we’ve been talking about Sam, Pete has stopped fidgeting, loosened his tie, and undone his top shirt button. He’s calming down and warming up, and somehow, reminding me more of Sam. “It’s symbolic. Or some shit like that. Whatever, I don’t fucking get it.… And then he’s going to apply for scholarships to medical school in the fall.”

“Scholarships?”

“Yeah. He won’t take money from either of our parents, and he won’t take it from me, either, though I keep telling him there has to be some benefit to me becoming fucking mini-Dad.” I glance at Pete, but he’s not actually being bitter, he’s just being honest.

God. I wish Sam had told me a tiny bit of this stuff. Though maybe the clues were there all along. I just didn’t look. Too busy thinking about myself.

And now my brain is turning over and over, thinking about the difference between doing the right thing and the wrong thing, between being a good person or a bad person, between secrets and lies. It’s so confusing.…

The thing is, everyone thinks they’re making the right decision when they’re making it. It’s only later that our mistakes become clear. And then we either make amends and fix those mistakes and deal with the aftermath, or we don’t. Either way, life moves on.

Perspective is a bitch, but at least she’s consistent.

We reach lower Manhattan. Endless skyscrapers light up the night sky. Millions of tiny twinkly lights, millions of people … Goddamn, this city is big.

And then we’re finally here.

North Cove Marina. The place where yachts meet skyscrapers, where Manhattan meets the deep blue sea.

Pete and I jump out of the car and hurry toward the pier, and as we get closer, I can just make out two figures. They’re screaming at each other. And then I realize who they are, and suddenly, I forget how to breathe.

Sam.

And Roger Rutherford.

CHAPTER
48

At first, I can’t make out any words. Just two extremely angry male voices shouting over each other. Even from twenty feet away I can see Sam is upset—oh God, I hate that. I feel almost sick at the idea of him being miserable.

Pete immediately charges between them and starts shouting, too, but I hang back, right at the end of the pier. It’s horrible to watch, an almost violent fury between them. I can’t imagine my father or mother ever screaming at me like that. It’s like Sam’s father really hates him. No wonder Sam wanted to leave.

“Don’t you dare tell me you didn’t know—”

“I was standing up for what I thought was right, goddamnit—”

“You were picking sides and being a pain in my ass—”

“I told you I never wanted to see you again, I meant it—”

“STOP IT!” Pete shouts so loudly that my ears hurt.

Sam and his father turn to Pete, their faces consumed with anger.

“Dad, back off, Jesus Christ!” says Pete. “What, you thought you’d come down here and bully Sam back into the family?”

“I thought I’d—”

“I’m still talking! And Sam, do you think maybe you could apologize to the old man for causing him so much trouble over the years?”

“I was doing what I thought—”

“But it wasn’t right. It wasn’t black or white, Sam, nothing ever is!”

“I don’t need this! Fuck! This is why I left in the first place!”

Sam throws his arms up in the air, and then turns around, walking quickly away from his family, down the pier toward me. I’ve never seen him so worked up; he looks like he wants to cry and scream and run, all at once. I know that feeling; hell, that feeling has ruled me for years.

And then, when he’s about fifteen feet away, Sam sees me and stops walking.

“Angie?”

I can’t hang back anymore. I rush toward him, wrap my arms around him.

“I’m so sorry,” we say in unison.

Then I lean back and kiss him, over and over again. My brain, my heart, my body is in free fall, and the only thought in my head is
Sam
.

Right this second, all I want is to make Sam’s life easier and happier. I want to take away every sadness in his life, to make everything better for him, in every way possible.

It’s the strangest feeling, this love. It’s overwhelming. I want to protect him and be protected by him. I want to talk to him and listen to him. I want everything he wants to come true for him. It’s not like anything I’ve ever felt before … it’s whole. Complete. It will always be a part of me, it will never go away. But we don’t have time to talk about it right now.

All we have time to do is kiss.

So in every kiss I try to tell him that I love him, that I hope he forgives me for running away, that I understand his past was his past and he didn’t want to talk about it. I try to tell him that I know him so well, I love every inch of him, and that I know that I’ve only just breached the surface of him, of who he is and what he wants and what he’s capable of doing with his life. I want to tell him that he’s my best friend and my love, like no one else ever has been or will be again. And with every kiss, I feel like he’s telling me the same thing.

“Oh, Angie, I’m so glad you’re here, so glad,” he whispers, leaning his forehead against mine. “I’m sorry. I should have told you everything.”

“No, I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen, I was wrong—”

“I wanted to tell you, it was killing me, really—”