Sam went into her room and cried until she’d completely exhausted herself. She longed for crying yourself to sleep to be a real thing. Sleep would have been a break. But she felt like she was on high alert, abandoned in this weird space with a heart full of terrifying feelings.
It was dark when her dad came in with a cookie and a cup of tea. “I heard,” he said, sitting down on the side of her bed. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to make this up to you.”
“I don’t either,” Sam said, and turned over.
“I was desperate, Sam. It was so selfish.”
“It really was.”
“You’re going to have to forgive me sometime.”
Sam turned to face him. “Actually, that’s one thing I don’t have to do.”
36
Wyatt
Wyatt flew with his mom back to New York immediately after his high school graduation. It was too early for the Holloways to be there, as Sam would still be in school. He stayed one night before getting in his dad’s old truck and driving across the country. As he made his way west, sleeping in the bed of the truck and occasionally splurging on a motel, he tried to think of anything but Sam. It was painful to know how easy it should have been to pick up the phone and bridge this huge gap he’d put between them. But he didn’t have any words that didn’t come out angry.
For three thousand miles, he thought about the time bomb that was his family and how Bill had sped things along. His anger was a huge, ever-growing pain that filled every part of his body. He tried to remember feeling as happy as he had last summer, and the loss of that feeling just made him angrier. He had to protect Sam from the ugliness inside of him. So he didn’t call.
He had two thousand dollars saved up from summer jobs that would buy him a little time to find work. His plan was to bartend at a music venue while he found a way to break into the business. He had a catalog of exactly three finished songs that he wanted to record.
Looking back, it was madness. It was the specific kind of dreaming that belongs to a person who doesn’t know any better. Like a ten-year-old who’s sure he’ll play in the NBA someday. All he had was a duffel bag and Dr. Nick’s guitar, on his way to becoming a rock star. Even if someone had reasoned with him, he wouldn’t have changed course. He knew that his future was in music the way he knew the sun was coming up tomorrow. But then again, he had thought his future was Sam too.
He found an apartment on Market Street in Venice Beach on Craigslist for four hundred dollars per month. It turned out it was just a studio apartment, one large room with his roommate’s bed and a kitchenette in the corner. What passed for his bedroom was the walk-in closet, which had its own window and enough space for a twin mattress.
The building was on an alley that led to the busiest drug-trafficking street in Los Angeles. On either end of this alley were spectacular ficus trees with intricate trunks and root systems that tore up the sidewalks. Wyatt came to see Los Angeles in this light: beautiful and invasive, natural and violent.
His dream of bartending his way to success was an instant failure. There were no jobs in music venues for bartenders. There were no jobs anywhere for bartenders. He eventually took a job at a Shell station two blocks from his apartment and made minimum wage pumping gas, and more for minor car repairs. As he walked to work each day, he felt the flow of his life: playing guitar and fixing cars. Nearly all he’d ever wanted. Except Sam.
He liked to drive up to Malibu to surf at Point Dume and hear the music roll off the beach. The warm air, the gulls, and the cold water brought him back to Long Island. He thought about Sam and how he’d destroyed that last good thing in his life. It was as if everyone around him had let him down, so he figured he’d just finish the job. Wyatt stayed out on the water as long as he could, because there he couldn’t help but be honest with himself. And when he was honest with himself, the songs came.
37
Sam
As her junior year wrapped up and the summer loomed, Sam dreaded going out to the beach. She’d never been there without Wyatt, and the thought of looking down the beach and not seeing him walking toward her with his surfboard, not hearing his guitar from the treehouse—it was enough to take her down for good. She daydreamed about picking up her phone and seeing a text: Meet me at the beach. And that daydream made her whole body ache. Her parents agreed to let her stay in the city for the summer, and her mother came back every few weeks to check on her. Sam worked as a hostess in a Mexican restaurant and saw herself and Wyatt in every couple that walked in and shared nachos. She tried to divine from their body language what it was that they were doing right.
* * *
When Sam started her senior year there was no doubt that she needed help, and she agreed to see a therapist. Dr. Judy let her talk for the first three sessions without saying much at all. Sam told her the whole story of their relationship and their families and the blowup. She confessed that she sometimes spent the hours between three and five a.m. staring at her phone, willing something to happen.
“Sometimes when my body is exhausted in the pool, I force myself to swim one more lap so he’ll call. Or I tell myself that if I get to Fourteenth Street and the light is green it means he’s going to call. I hold my breath a lot.” Sam laughed a tiny laugh and pulled a throw pillow onto her lap. The piping was coming unraveled and she wanted to pull it right off. “I’ve gone crazy, haven’t I?”
“A little bit,” said Dr. Judy, leaning forward in her chair for the first time. “It’s not your fault. You’re addicted.”
“To Wyatt?”
“Yes. To him and mainly the idea of him. You are addicted to the dopamine reaction you feel when you get a hit of him. This is typical of a user who became hooked on a substance during a critical time of development, and now that addiction is woven into your nervous system. You’re well into your detox, and I am recommending no contact, which should be easy.” Dr. Judy laughed at that last comment, which stung.
“You’re putting me in a twelve-step program for heartbreak?”
“Kind of. You have an open wound, let’s let it scab and then heal.”
Sam stared at her hands. There was a raw cuticle on her right index finger that gave her a delicious spurt of pain when she worried it with her thumb. “But I love him. That’s the whole point. You can’t just make yourself stop loving someone.”
“You’re eighteen years old. You’re not in love with this boy. It’s youth and sex and excitement, all mixed up into an obsession. Technically, I’d call this an adjustment disorder. We have to get you adjusted to life without him and focused on something else.”
Sam just stared at her.
“Trust me on this, and I can help you.”
It seemed to Sam that she was probably right. She must have been addicted if the thought of never touching him again made her physically sick. Dr. Judy even went so far as to tell her parents to get her a new phone to break the visual and tactile association with Wyatt. Sam had to promise not to look him up. No Myspace, no Facebook. Sam liked the basic idea of this. She liked the idea that she had a disease that could be cured. She liked the implication that maybe Wyatt was bad for her. She felt a bit of relief in the way Dr. Judy minimized the whole thing, like she’d flicked the lights on in a horror movie to reveal that the bloody bits were just ketchup.
* * *
When Gracie was born in December, Sam dutifully visited her mother at the hospital. Bill placed Gracie in her arms without even asking. Sam handed her right back. Travis was home for the holidays, and the apartment was too small for a family of four plus a crying baby. Gracie slept in a bassinet in her parents’ room, but the every-three-hours wailing seeped right into Sam and Travis’s room and worked Sam’s already agitated nerves. It was her father who had caused the breakup, but in truth it was Gracie who was the last straw. Sam wasn’t about to admit to Dr. Judy that she resented a baby, but there it was.
Sam babysat for the first time when Gracie was six weeks old. She woke up from her nap screaming, and Sam found her in her crib sweaty and red-eyed. “You stink,” Sam said, lifting her up and placing her on her parents’ bed to change her. Gracie looked Sam right in the eye, like she wanted to tell her something.