“No,” Sam laughed. “Just trust me, okay?” He pulled off the dirt road and parked several yards from the water. He shut off the ignition and crossed around to the passenger side to help me out. “Come on,” he said. “It’s not muddy.”
I hopped out of the Jeep. He took my hand, lacing his fingers through mine the way he had at the party. We walked in silence under the bridge. I looked at the water, half expecting to see a boat or something down there. But when we reached the bank, Sam gently put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around so that I was facing the underside of the bridge.
I stared without speaking. I didn’t know what to say; it was like nothing I’d ever seen.
The entire underside of the bridge abutment was painted with a mural in all the colors of the rainbow. Every available inch of space was filled with individual scenes. Kids played together; families sat around the dinner table; stars sparkled in the sky.
“Wow,” I said. “This is amazing.”
“It’s where I used to come before we moved to Plymouth. You know, when I needed to get away,” Sam said.
“How did you find this mural?” I asked.
Sam laughed. “Find it? I painted it.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “What?”
He looked a little embarrassed. “I mean, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s just how I get stuff out, you know? Like this.” He walked over and pointed to a scene of three people standing together, their backs to us. The man in the middle was pointing upward. The boys to either side of him, one younger than the other, were looking in the direction of his finger. “This is the first thing I painted. It’s my dad and my brother and me when we were little. He used to take us to the air show in Chicopee. For some reason, after his stroke, this was the image I couldn’t get out of my head.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. I reached out and touched the paint, feeling its texture beneath my fingers.
“And this”—he walked me a few feet to the right, where a man and a woman knelt laughing under a Christmas tree—“was the Christmas that my dad gave my mom a pair of socks and then surprised her by pulling a necklace out of his bathrobe pocket while she was trying to pretend she liked the socks.”
He took me down the mural, pointing out scenes here and there. I couldn’t get over the level of skill; some of the figures looked real enough to reach out and touch. As Sam talked me through some of the pictures, I couldn’t help feeling like I was reading the CliffsNotes to his life. I liked it.
After a while, he led me over to a cement block near the river, and we sat down.
“So, you never told me what happened to your dad,” he said after a minute. He reached for my hand and squeezed. “You don’t have to talk about it. But if you want to, I’d like to hear.”
I looked down at the water. “I’m sure you’ve heard the story,” I said. “Everyone at school talks about it.”
“I don’t listen to rumors,” Sam said.
I took a deep breath. “Okay.” I looked up and cleared my throat.
“It happened last November,” I began. Slowly, I told him about that crisp, bright autumn morning eleven months ago, when everything in the world had seemed so perfect. The words poured out, as they’d never done before. No one had ever asked for my story; everyone assumed they already knew.
“The worst part about it is …” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Sam put his hand on my shoulder, and I knew he was trying to comfort me. I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I think it was my fault,” I said, so softly that I wasn’t sure Sam could even hear me.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said right away.
“Yeah, it was.” I still couldn’t look at him. “Sam, if I hadn’t spent that extra time in the bathroom, if I hadn’t been so stupid and shallow”—I took a deep breath—“my dad would still be here.”
“Lacey,” Sam said firmly.
I continued to look down. I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“Lacey,” Sam repeated. “Look at me.” His face was inches from mine. I could feel his warm breath. He was looking at me intensely.
“What?” I whispered
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said.
“But it was,” I said. “If I had just taken less time–”
“No.”
“But if I had screamed or something when I saw the other car–”
“No, Lacey.”
“If I hadn’t been dragging my feet to annoy Logan–”
“No,” Sam cut me off, his voice leaving no room for argument. “It was not your fault. Just like it wasn’t my fault with my dad. I beat myself up about it for a while, Lacey. Even after the doctors said there wasn’t anything I could have done. But it wasn’t me. And it wasn’t you. And as unfair as this is, and as hard as it is to understand, it was just their time for something to happen.”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t believe that. How could it have been my dad’s time? He was thirty-eight. Just the other day, we’d read in history class about a man in Puerto Rico who had lived to be 115. How was that possible? He had lived three of my father’s lifetimes.