What I Didn't Say (17 page)

“No,” Sam said, shaking her head.  “Pull around back.”

I gave her a quizzical look but did as she said, pulling around the side of the house to the back.

There was an old motorhome parked just behind the house, out of view from the driveway.  A green garden hose ran from the house to the motorhome, and another orange line I assumed was a power cord.  The motorhome was covered in moss, the same moss that claimed everything on the island that wasn’t kept up.

“Come on,” Sam said, getting out of the car.  Her demeanor was still cold as I climbed out after her.  She walked up to the motorhome and climbed up the shaky stairs.  She opened the door and stepped inside, me following right behind her, our notebook in hand.

The inside was cleaner than the outside, but it was still dark and old.  A small kitchen consisted of a tiny cluttered counter and sink.  The dining table was covered in school books and pages from notebooks.  Toward the back there was a door that opened to what looked like a bedroom and a broom closet of a bathroom.

I looked at Sam, searching for an explanation as to what we were doing out here instead of going into the house.

“This is where I live, Jake,” she said, her eyes holding mine firmly.  “All by myself.”

Not sure I was doing it correctly, I made the signs for
where
and
Mom
.

Sam didn’t respond immediately.  Her eyes reddened and a little moisture pooled in them, but they never left mine.

“My mom died in August,” she said, her voice cracking.

I just kept looking at Samantha, my brain not quite processing the heavy words she had just spoken.  Kids our age didn’t have to say sentences like that.

Dropping her eyes from my face, Sam sniffed, wiping at a tear that had broken free onto her cheek.  She walked back toward the bedroom, me numbly following her.  She sank onto the messy bed and I sat next to her.

Opening our notebook and pulling a pen from my pocket, I wrote.
  I don’t understand,

Sam read my writing, sniffing again, looking completely exhausted.  Finally, she raised her eyes to meet mine.

“My mom quit her job in June,” Sam started.  “She was getting tired of all the traveling and I didn’t want to travel with her anymore; it was just getting too hard with school.  She didn’t want to leave me alone all the time.  The same week she quit, she went to the doctor because she wasn’t feeling very well.  A week later we found out she had stage-four brain cancer.  She’d always written her headaches off as just stress from work.  She’d joke around and say her diminishing hearing was because she was getting old.”

And that was the real reason Sam started taking sign language.

I let out a long, slow breath, leaning back on my hands, like I needed to give some space to the huge
thing
that had just been revealed.  This was much, much bigger than I ever would have expected.

“Only a few people on the island knew,” Sam moved forward.  “Mom didn’t want people feeling sorry for her, you know?”  I did.  “So she kept it quiet.  It wasn’t that hard, not a lot of people on the island really knew Mom because she was always gone.

“Not many people survive stage-four brain cancer.  By that point it’s too late.  It was for my mom.  They said she could start treatments, but it was only going to slow it down for a few weeks and it was just going to make her feel sick all the time,” Sam’s lower lip quivered a little bit.  “She only had ten weeks after we found out.  We had some money saved up after she quit her job, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to pay for all the hospital bills.  We put the house up for sale the beginning of August, hoping we could keep her in the hospital for just a little longer, give her another week or so.  The house sold just eight days before she died.  She signed all the papers for it in the hospital.  We got the money for it the day she died.”

Tears were freely slipping down Sam’s face now.  I reached a hand out and brushed a stream of them from her right cheek.  She squeezed her eyes closed, pressing her hand against mine, trapping my hand against her face.

“No one ever came to get me, Jake,” she said in a hoarse whisper, her eyes still closed.  “I talked to people, thought my grandparents were coming, or Mike, my father.  Child services kept going back and forth on who would take custody.  But no one ever came for me.

“Finally I caught a bus after Mom had been buried in Everett, and came back to the island.  By then I realized I was on my own.  So I took what money we had left, after we sold the house and paid Mom’s bills, and bought this crappy motorhome.  That house is just a summer home so I figure I’m good to stay here until they come back in June.”

I brought my other hand up to the other side of Samantha’s face.  Her eyes opened to look at mine, so uncertain looking.  I could only stare at her.

This explained everything.  Why Sam had withdrawn from everyone so much this year.  Why she had lost so much weight.  She had no money for food.  And her mom hadn’t been stuck in an airport, today on Thanksgiving.  She’d been long gone.

Sam was lonelier than I ever could have imagined.

“So you understand why I was so pissed earlier,” she said, holding my eyes.  “Maybe you can’t talk anymore, and that sucks.  But you still have family.  You still have a house.  You still have
food
,” her breathing was coming out heavy and tired.  “You still have everything Jake, and you just didn’t see it.”

I felt something behind my eyes prickle and was surprised when a tear rolled down my own cheek.  I wanted to tell her I was sorry.  I wanted to take back the entire last seven days.  I wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.

There were a lot worse things that could happen to you than losing your voice.

Opening the notebook again, I set to scribbling a confession.  I had to tell her now.

The night I had my accident,
I wrote. 
I was coming to see you.  I was drunk, but the guys talked me into it.  I was coming to tell you…

Samantha ripped the page out of my hands, her eyes reading along as I wrote.  I looked up into her face, confused, on the verge of being hurt that she wouldn’t let me write it.

“Don’t say it,” she whispered, her eyes locked on my face, her eyes misty.  She shook her head.  “Don’t say that.”

Everything within me wanted to say
but it’s true
.  My hand rose to the side of her face again.  Sam’s eyes studied my lips and I studied hers.  We each leaned in closer until our foreheads were touching.  It felt like currents of electricity were running through the two of us, making me feel like I was going to melt from the intensity.

I wanted to whisper a million things to Sam, all the things I didn’t say, but I couldn’t.  So instead I leaned forward and let my lips show her.

Sam’s lips were hesitant at first, as if over-thinking if she was going to regret doing this.  And then they softened under mine.  Her hand came to the back of my neck, as my hands pressed into her back.

There was a lot of pain in that kiss.  There was so much hurt and so much fear in it.  I felt tears rolling down the both of our faces.  But, in that kiss, there was even more want.  We both wanted to smother out that pain, to not have so many horrible things in the all too recent past, to just be normal, to do the types of things we were supposed to be dealing with besides death and disability.

Sam shifted on top of me, pressing me back against the bed.  Her lips moved with mine in a way that was so familiar I could have sworn we had done this a thousand times before.  And yet it was so new, I never wanted to stop cause I was afraid if we did, I would realize none of this was real.

Sam’s lips tasted like strawberries and bananas.

Sam leaned back away from me, her eyes studying mine.  She had that look again, like there was something on her mind.

As if she could read
what?
on my face, she answered.

“I’ve liked you for a while, Jake,” she said.  “I meant to do something about it this summer, but then Mom got sick and I couldn’t be worrying about the boy I liked when my mother was dying.”  She stopped for a second, studying my eyes again.  “I just wanted you to know that.”

I brushed the back of my hand against her cheek, my eyes still locked on hers.

She hadn’t told me she loved me.  I believed Sam when she had written about not believing in love.  But she had said that she at least liked me.

In that moment, that meant everything.

I lifted my head off the bed and pressed my lips to hers briefly.  She smiled in a way I’d never seen her smile before.  I committed to making her smile like that as much as I possibly could.

I reached over on the bed for our notebook and the pen.

This changes things,
I wrote, turning it so she could see it.

“Yeah,” she smiled, kissing my lips again.  “It does.”

We spent the next two hours talking, filling a full ten sheets of paper.  I asked how she survived, where she got money from.  I was surprised when she told me she made money from some girl who went to a prep school down in Seattle, doing homework for her and sending it online. 

She told me how she was afraid someone would eventually realize she was still here and try to come and take her away.  The plan was always to go to UW after graduation and get her teaching degree, but to secure her scholarship she needed to make sure she kept her Valedictorian status, and she couldn’t do that unless she stayed here at Orcas High School.

She just had to stay hidden for the next nineteen weeks until she turned eighteen.

About three weeks ago she’d moved the motorhome to this house from somewhere just passed the golf course when the owners moved back into their house.  And a few weeks back, she’d looked so terrible because she’d gone three days without power.  Some rodents had chewed through her wires.  I was impressed she’d fixed them herself.

I couldn’t feel sorry for myself anymore, I knew that.  Seeing what Sam had to live with, how she’d kept going after she’d lost everything,
everything,
made me feel like a criminal.  I did have everything, except a voice.  I wasn’t going to waste any more time acting like an idiot and letting my life go unlived.

I vowed to live every second of it after that day in Sam’s motorhome.

19 weeks ‘til Sam’s birthday

11 hours since finding out the truth

There had never been a better Thanksgiving break than the one senior year.  Mom, Jamie, Jenny, and Jordan went off-island early on Black Friday, not expecting to get much, just going off.  Dad, John, James, and Joshua went off as well to do I didn’t know what.  I pretended to be unawakable when they came in to get me in the morning, and thankfully, they left me alone with a note.  As soon as I knew they were gone, I pulled my clothes on, and went to Teazer’s for cinnamon rolls and strawberry milk.  I got to Sam’s trailer at eight, just as the sun was starting to come up.  I knocked three times, careful not to drop our breakfast on the ground.

I heard something hit the ground with force, followed by a curse.  I smiled, silently chuckling.  Finally, Sam opened the door, her eyes wide with fear.

“Jake!” she said, surprise and relief washing over her.  “Oh my…  Geesh!  You scared me!  I thought you must have been the owners or the cops.  What are you doing here so early?”

I held up the bag and the cups.  I couldn’t help but stare at Sam’s legs.  They stuck out of a thin red bathrobe that clung to her tiny frame.  Sam really did need to put on about fifteen pounds.  I’d have to start bringing her to dinner as often as Mom would allow. 

“Aww,” she said, that smile spreading on her face.  “You brought me breakfast?”

I nodded and stepped inside.  It wasn’t freezing in the motorhome, but it wasn’t terribly warm either.  I noticed one little space heater back in the bedroom.  I made a mental note to look through our storage for a more powerful one.