chapter SEVENTY-FIVE
• SAM •
In comparison to our journey that morning, it took no time at all to get back to the field where the helicopter had found us.
And there Beck was, his body a wreck. There were all kinds of internal parts lying outside of him that I’d never considered him having.
“Sam,” Grace said to me.
His body was so flat and thin looking now, like it had nothing left in it. And maybe it didn’t. Maybe it had all been annihilated from the blast. Those pieces, though. That he had dragged with him before he died. I remembered the bird that Shelby had killed in our driveway.
Sam.
The mouth was parted open, the tongue laying over teeth. Not like a dog would pant, but in a strange, unnatural way. The angle of the tongue made me think that the body must be stiff. Just like a dog hit by a car, really, just another dead body.
sam
say
his eyes, though
something
it had his eyes
sam
and I had so much left to say to him
you’re scaring me
I would be fine. I was fine. It was like I had known all along that he would die. Be dead. That we would find his body like this, ruined and undone, that he would be gone from me and we would never fix what had been broken. I would not cry, because this was just the way it would be. He would be gone, but he had been gone before, and this wouldn’t feel any different, this absolute gone, this forever gone, this gone without hope of spring and warm weather bringing him back to me.
I would feel nothing, because there was nothing to feel. I felt I’d lived this moment a thousand times, so many times that I had no energy or emotion left to bring to the scene. I tried out the idea in my head, Beck is dead, Beck is dead, Beck is dead, waiting for tears, for feeling, for anything.
The air smelled like spring around us, but it felt like winter.
• GRACE •
Sam just stood there, shaking, hands beside him, silent and staring down at the body at our feet. Something terrible in his face made tear after noiseless tear slide down my cheek.
“Sam,” I begged. “Please.”
Sam said, “I’m fine.”
And then he just crumpled gently to the ground. He was a curled form, hands up behind his head, pulling his face down to his knees, so far beyond crying that I didn’t know what to do.
I crouched beside him and wrapped my arms around him. He shook and shook, but no tears came.
“Grace,” he whispered, and in that one word, I heard agony. He was running a hand through his hair again and again, knotting and releasing fistfuls of it in his palm, ceaseless. “Grace, help me. Help me.”
But I didn’t know what to do.