Sharing Sam (2 page)

I took it at a walk, afraid to jostle him any more than necessary. Holding the reins necessitated the occasional wrist-to-waist contact. My wrist, his hard, warm waist. I could smell sweat and tobacco and grass and skin, all mixed in with horse. Sounds awful, I know. It wasn’t.

We fell into a smooth, gentle back-and-forth roll that was all Snickers’s doing. My breasts grazed Sam’s back, my thighs his thighs. Sounds harmless, I know. It wasn’t.

Something was happening, something I didn’t want to think about too hard. I couldn’t say why, but I had the feeling Lance Potts was being retired from active daydream duty.

Lance had the résumé, he had the dimpled smile and the blue eyes. But it was Sam who was giving me goosebumps in eighty-degree Florida sunshine.

We rode so silently that I half wondered if Sam had lapsed into a coma. When we got to the highway, I reined Snickers to a halt. “I live a mile down,” I said. “I could give you a lift to the doctor.”

“No doctor,” Sam said.

“Why not?”

“No money.”

“I could lend—”

Sam hefted himself off the saddle, swinging a leg over Snickers’s neck. He landed with a grimace.

“Where do you live, anyway? I wouldn’t mind—”

“I’ll hitch, thanks.”

“You can’t hitch.”

He looked up, squinting against the afternoon glare. “Oh?

Why’s that?”

“You’ll end up by the side of the road in a mangled heap. Not unlike your motorcycle.”

“I’m a big boy. I’ll take my chances.”

“You take too many chances,” I said, doing an uncanny impersonation of my mother. I dismounted and grabbed my pack from Sam. “Here,” I said. “Let me at least give you cab money.”

“No.”

“A quarter for the phone?”

For the first time, Sam smiled. He touched my shoulder. “I’ll be okay, Alison.”

I momentarily forgot how to respond, so I kept busy digging through my backpack for some cash. While I did, Sam sauntered over to Snickers. He whispered something in her ear, something she must have liked, because normally she won’t let a guy within three feet of her head. He leaned close and kissed her gently on the muzzle, and I felt myself coming to some kind of very important decision.

He caught me looking, and I pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Here,” I said. “At least take this.”

But by then Sam was already heading down the road, thumb outstretched, sizing up the possibilities whizzing past.

I watched as he grew smaller and smaller, until at last a
battered red pickup stopped and Sam hopped into the cab. It roared off, kicking up dust.

I wondered if he would survive the drive, the day, the year. I hoped so, because I had the insane feeling I was in distinct danger of falling in love.

A
S I UNTACKED
Snickers in the little barn behind our house, I got rational about the encounter with Sam. I want to be a biologist, and biologists are big on logic. Scientific method and all that. What data did I have about Sam, when you got down to it? That he was from somewhere else. That he showed evidence of a death wish, or at least bad judgment. The Harley, the hitching, the smoking. Not good, but still, it wasn’t like he was wrestling alligators at Gator World.

He was in some advanced classes, like Izzy and me, which meant he probably had some smarts, not that I’d seen too much evidence of it. And I’d heard he was cutting classes already. More not good.

On the up side, he wasn’t bad-looking.

Okay, so maybe that was an understatement. Maybe he was startlingly, breathtakingly, mind-bogglingly good-looking. Plus, he carried pocket Kleenex and had kissed my horse.

I buried my face in the smooth warmth of Snickers’s mane.
Not much to go on. Kleenex and a kiss, and not even my kiss. Not even an intraspecies kiss.

Still, something had happened out there on the highway. The kind of something that felt remarkably like the early stages of the flu. Churning insides, liquid knees, that sort of thing.

It could be the flu, I conceded. Or it could be that I was actually, finally, me of all people, falling in love.

I was certain what falling in love would be like. Love arrived with bells and whistles and flashing lights, sort of like when the fire alarm at school goes off during a math quiz. I mean, you
know
it’s happened. And you
want
it to happen, bad. And I’d always known that when I fell in love, it would be just that—a fall, a parachute jump out of an airplane, a bungee-cord swan dive off the Skyline Bridge to Tampa.

I’d never actually bungeed, mind you (hey, I’m not insane), but the way my stomach was pinballing around, I was pretty sure this was how it would feel.

But I was having some tiny second thoughts. I’d always assumed that when I did fall in love, it would (a) be with Lance Potts, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, and (b) not be with a guy who smoked, crashed bikes, and may or may not have been the illegitimate son of Mick Jagger.

I was, as the school counselors like to say, conflicted.

I needed somebody to unconflict me.

I needed Izzy.

Science was what had brought Izzy and me together. We’d met at a summer program at Mote Marine, a research lab in Sarasota. I was nine, she was eight, and we were the only participants, male or female, willing to handle a mud snake.
Voilà
. Instant best friends.

Izzy (full name Isabella Cates-Lopez) was brilliant, a real, live, certifiable genius. A Westinghouse semifinalist who’d skipped her freshman year, a genetics whiz, the kind of person whose brain was so far into theoretical stuff that trying to explain it to me was like discussing it with her cat. I was into ecology, species saving, hands-on science. She was theoretical, abstract, head-in-the-ozone.

But it wasn’t like we were geeks, exactly. We were normal, nice-looking, red-blooded American high-school juniors who just happened to have been overlooked in the great pairing lottery. Each of us knew her prince would come. We just figured they were taking the scenic route.

At that moment my ten-year-old sister appeared in the doorway. She expertly spun a basketball on her index finger. “You have the most disgusting grin on your face. Sort of like a stoned cow.”

“Did Izzy call?” I asked. There was no point in responding to her. Sara was going through an obnoxious phase. Near as I could pinpoint, it had started sometime around conception.

“What am I, your social secretary?” Sara stroked Snickers’s chin. “I was shooting hoops.”

“She’s probably still at the eye doctor,” I said. I passed her Snickers’s saddle. Sara scowled, but she dropped her basketball and took the saddle into the large storage room that doubled as a tack room.

“Izzy getting glasses?” Sara called.

“Not at this rate,” I said. “She has these headaches, and she’s gone to, like, three eye doctors, but Iz refuses to believe them when they say she needs glasses.”

Sara returned and straddled a bench. “Can I take Snickers out for a while?”

“I just cooled her down, Sara.” I led Snickers into her stall. “And you know the deal. You help with feeding and grooming her and mucking out her stall, you can ride her all you want. You don’t, no deal.”

She sat there practicing her laser-guided hate looks, a shorter, ganglier version of me. Same light brown hair, same gray eyes, same sweet, wholesome looks that made grandmothers pinch my cheek and guys yawn. I didn’t hate her the way she seemed to hate me, but then I wasn’t ten, the age when you aren’t afraid to say what you’re really feeling. Around Sara I just felt … well, confused. Usually, I had a pretty good instinct for what was going on in other people’s heads. But communicating with my little sister was like trying to get through to an annoying, untrainable, occasionally vicious pet.

“Have I mentioned lately that I detest you, Al?” Sara said by way of good-bye.

I went to the tack room and settled on a trunk, breathing in the rich, sweet smell of leather and saddle soap. I pushed four, Izzy’s speed-dial number on the portable phone. Lauren, Izzy’s mom, answered. Izzy was at the library, she told me. Her voice was subdued, soft around the edges. I could hear sobbing in the background, punctuated by Spanish.

“Is that Rosa?” I asked, a flutter of worry in my stomach. Rosa was Izzy’s Cuban aunt, who shared their waterfront condo.

“Yes, dear.”

Lauren never called me “dear.” It wasn’t her style. “Is everything all right?”

“I have to go now. Isabella’s at the library. You can talk to
her there.” A fresh wail in the background. “Really, now, I have to go.”

I listened to the dial tone. Someone must have died, was all I could figure. One of Rosa’s relatives back in Cuba, maybe. Izzy’s dad, a well-known fiction writer, had come to the United States from Cuba many years ago. Her mother, who’d edited his books for the U.S. market, had helped arrange the whole thing. It was all very romantic, I thought. First to fall in love with his ideas, his words. Then him. Very bigger-than-life.

I grabbed the keys to the station wagon and promised my mom I’d be back in time for dinner.

Way back when, my parents, who shared a thriving veterinary practice, had used the aging wagon for occasional emergencies. It had once even played ambulance for a goat who’d eaten a Tupperware tub full of lentil pilaf. It smelled a little rank, but I’d convinced my parents to keep it around as an extra family car. It wasn’t the sexiest transportation on earth, but at least I had wheels.

The New College library was virtually empty; it was almost dinnertime. I found Izzy at her usual carrel, a nice corner spot without the distraction of a window view. She was hunched over, her long hair obscuring her face. I envied Izzy’s beauty sometimes, the exotic darkness from her father, the fragile intensity from her mother. Her face was long, her eyes deep-set. She was tall, very tall, and elegant without being self-conscious. It was an intimidating beauty, one that seemed to keep guys at bay. Still, I would have given anything to slip into her skin for a day.

Piles of books, thick ones with wordy titles, filled the
carrel. I dropped my backpack on one of them. “Iz,” I said, “what’s the most bizarre thing on earth I could tell you?”

She looked up from a book. Her eyes were bloodshot. Drops at the ophthalmologist’s, probably, but there was something else there that made me uneasy. “You’ve discovered a cure for cancer,” she said.

“You okay, Iz? Is something going on, I mean? I called your house and I could have sworn I heard Rosa crying.”

“She’s always crying. She cries over that cotton commercial with all the old people.”

“That’s what I figured.” I nodded at the books. “What’s the deal? You’re not doing some extra-credit stuff for Leach’s class, are you? You’re going to make the rest of us look like slugs.”

“Just a little light reading.” Her voice was not quite hers, I realized. It was like a message on an answering machine. I scanned the titles.
Principles and Practice of Clinical Oncology. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. Radiation and Chemotherapy: Therapeutic Advances
.

Something began to coil inside me, tightening, twisting, hurting. “Iz?” I said. “What did the eye doctor say?”

Izzy closed her book. “What’s the most bizarre thing on earth I could possibly tell you?” she said, and then she began to cry.

I drove Izzy to Turtle Beach, because the sun was going down and the ocean was quiet and it was the only thing I could think of to do.

We went to our usual spot, a gentle dune where we’d watched a loggerhead turtle lay her eggs in the glittering moonlight the previous May.

This was the place where we’d cried over bad grades and parental injustice and unrequited love. We’d discussed the eternal, slippery mystery of the ages—Guys: Why Are They Such Weenies? We’d mapped out college. We’d planned our brilliant careers. We’d written our joint Nobel acceptance speech and named our children (Izzy liked Guinevere, but I figured it was just a phase).

We’d allowed for the occasional setback—the males who resisted women in science, the costs of our education, the juggling of multiple loves on multiple continents.

We’d just never thought to allow for brain cancer.

The sun boiled into the horizon. We buried our feet in the floury sand. Mostly we cried. We did not speak. There were too many questions, no answers.

Izzy finally broke the silence, laughing at two gulls fighting over a piece of seaweed.

At the sound of her deep laugh, I realized I was furious. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded in a choked voice. “You
knew
, Iz. You’ve been going for tests—you weren’t going to an eye doctor. That time you got dizzy after PE and said it was your period.… You must have thought I was so stupid.” I was babbling as tears rolled down my cheeks. “I
was
so stupid. You’re my best friend, you jerk.”

She turned her placid gaze on me. “Was there a complete thought in there somewhere?”

I felt terrible. Everything I said mattered. This would be the scene where
I Found Out
, and I’d blown it already, yelling at Izzy when she needed me. There could be other scenes, scenes at the hospital, chemo or radiation maybe, and I would have to handle them better. I wanted to do this right, to be there for her until she was okay again.

“God, I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m a jerk. I just started thinking about you worrying, with no one to talk to, and at least I could have worried with you.”

“What point would there have been in both of us freaking?” Izzy asked calmly. “The first two doctors were telling me all kinds of things: it was nerves, it was stress, I needed glasses, I had the flu. And then they did the EEG and the MRI and a bunch of other tests with multiple letters, and the odds were so long that I figured …” She shrugged. “There’s still plenty of time to worry.”

She watched the waves weaving in and out of each other. Then she looked at me, straight on. “Five or six months, anyway.”

Five or six. Till summer, then. “You mean, six months until you’re all better,” I said, hoping I was right, knowing I wasn’t.

She shook her head, almost imperceptibly.