Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 60



Sam arrived at the hospital about an hour after they’d set my wrist.

“Jesus Christ, Jamie,” he said, when he met me in the empty waiting room. “Does it hurt a lot?”

“Yeah,” I answered, showing him my splint.

“What happened?” His tone was more sharp than sympathetic.

“Well, I fell and my fat pregnant ass landed on my own wrist. But I was lucky to fall on that and not on Charlie.”

“Very lucky,” Sam murmured, without looking at me. “On the phone, you said someone pushed you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s in custody now.”

“Like, with the police?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now, how did you end up at her place by yourself?”

“I had a feeling it was her.”

“And how did you know they’d come right after you?”

“I didn’t,” I admitted. “I just got lucky.”

“Jesus Christ,” he repeated, leaning back into a hospital snack machine. I gestured for him to sit next to me in the ugly green waiting room seats, but he ignored the silent request.

I didn’t make him ask anything else. I told him the whole story—starting with Gretchen’s final interview with Dr. Skinner and ending with the events in Diane’s backyard. When I was finished, he was quiet for a moment.

“What the f*ck were you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m fine, thank you very much,” I replied.

“I know you’re fine. I can see you’re fine. In a superficial sense, anyway. So now I’m asking you a deeper question.”

“I thought we were gonna try to retire the F-word for the sake of the rugrat.”

“Cut the crap, please. He’s not here yet. So what the f*ck were you thinking?”

I had to stifle a giggle. Sam was finally—and reasonably—angry enough at me to tell me to cut the crap, but had still remembered to say please.

“I was thinking about Gretchen,” I said, after thinking about it for a moment.

“Yeah. Someone killed Gretchen. You knew that when you left for Emerson on Friday.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But it seemed more important than dangerous. And I didn’t want to worry you.”

I studied Sam because I couldn’t think of a further explanation. His hair was wild, as he’d probably been rubbing his head nervously the whole way up to New Hampshire. His eyes were tired. I wondered if this was how he’d look in the hospital when Charlie Bucket was born. With that thought, a familiar feeling of panic returned to me—one I hadn’t felt since Gretchen had died. Perhaps it was being in a hospital that finally brought it back—the sudden, life-stopping, nauseating-exhilarating realization: One of these days, this kid is actually going to be born.

“More important than dangerous?” Sam repeated skeptically.

The wind had been knocked out of me, thinking about Charlie’s imminent arrival—about Charlie’s mere reality. It took me a moment to come back to our conversation.

“Gretchen and I had certain . . . standards for one another,” I said, after I’d caught my breath.

“So you’re saying she would have expected you to solve this for her.”

“No. She wanted to solve it for herself. But she couldn’t. Not quite. Someone stopped her before she got to finish. I couldn’t stand that.”

Sam was silent for a moment, his gaze flickering from me to the magazine table to the window, and then back to me again.

“Of course you couldn’t.”

“I needed to know that I could fix something. Just one thing. But I’m all right. Charlie is all right.”

“I’m still not wild about the name ‘Charlie,’ ” he admitted, finally stepping closer to me. “But I can still think about it.”

He sat in the seat next to mine, put his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands. But said nothing.

“It feels like a hundred years ago,” I said. “When Gretchen and I were in college together. When we were so close. And now it feels like a hundred years to go without her.”

Sam cast his eyes down. Did he wonder if the comfort of him and Charlie was not enough to endure this vast new life ahead of me, without someone who’d once been so important to me? I didn’t ask. Not because I didn’t want to reassure both him and myself, but because to do so was impossible. And I didn’t want to lie to him.

Sam moved his hand to my splint, and we both stared at it.

After a moment he said, “Tell me a story about Gretchen. About how she was in college.”

I was surprised at this request, but happy that he’d made it.

I thought for a minute, and then said, “Well, there was this liquor store about a mile away from campus that would sell weird-flavored schnapps. Disgusting flavors. Blueberry. Grape. But at the time we thought they were yummy. Every couple of weeks, we’d walk there and get a bottle to share. Sometimes late at night, sometimes in the freezing cold. Once or twice in the snow, even.

“And once, when we were walking in the snow, this guy stopped and offered us a ride. This guy was in his late thirties or early forties, I’d have guessed. In some slick black a*shole car, though I don’t remember the make now. And he just looked like a sleaze. Maybe not a psychopath or anything, probably more like someone who’d heard things about Forrester girls and maybe was hoping a ride could lead to a threesome. Something about his eyes and his smell told me that. I could smell his cologne from where I was standing, even though Gretchen was standing much closer.

“And he said, ‘You girls want a ride somewhere?’

“And Gretchen stared at him for a second, with this deer-in-headlights way she had about her sometimes. And then she looked at me, and I was wondering if I needed to tell her the answer was no.

“The guy was so startled by Gretchen, by her silence and her weird expression, that it threw him off. He couldn’t tell if she was game or just a little crazy.

“Then he said, ‘I . . . . uh . . . have heated seats.’

“And then he said again, ‘You want a ride?’

“And then Gretchen . . . I’ll never forget this. She took the bag with the schnapps in it, took off the cap really slowly, took a little sip, and then said to him, very serenely, ‘Not in the least.’ ”

Sam chuckled a little. I continued.

“He didn’t say anything back. He just looked confused for a second and then drove away. We got a good laugh at that, once he’d driven away. And for a couple of years after that, whenever one of us was in some kind of precarious situation or another, the other one would say, ‘Well, you know, I have heated seats . . .’ ”

Sam looked puzzled. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know. But we thought it was funny at the time. I can just see us like that. Sometimes, when I’m driving somewhere, and I see two girls walking together, talking . . . I think of us then. How we thought we were the most cynical people in the world, with our little paper bag of kiddie liquor. The way we’d make each other laugh. The way we knew how stupid everyone and everything but ourselves was. It was so ridiculous and so perfect. How we understood, finally, what dumb girls we’d been before we knew each other, and what smart women we were going to be.”

Sam nodded uncertainly.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I think my being sad about her dying is the most selfish thing. I mean, where it comes from. Because it’s maybe not just about being sad for her—but being sad for myself, and missing how we were together. Coming back to her was always like being reminded of that part of myself, reminded that it was still there. And without her, how am I going to remember to do that?”

Sam ran a finger up and down my splint, then cracked a tiny smile.

“I believe you may still be more of that person,” he said, “than you think.”

“Is that a good thing?” I asked.

Sam thought for a moment before answering.

“Sometimes, Madhat.”

I nodded and instinctively began to reach for my stomach, remembering a half second later that my splint would not allow me to. I reached with my left since my right ached.