To Live

by C. G. Cooper

  That fear, he thought – When does it go away?

  Never, he realized. It only gets shrunk to a size that you can deal with.

  The treatment was altogether pretty darned smooth. The mood was somber at times, melancholy when the woman next to him staggered to her feet, looking as emaciated as a prison camp survivor. But there was Sam, quick to help her. She smiled in return. It was an Eve moment.

  The afternoon ended too quickly. Sam said her goodbye in the parking lot.

  “You sure you don’t want to grab a bite to eat?”

  “Elmore Thaddeus Nix, I’ll be in touch soon.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that declaration.

  “I don’t have your phone number,” he said.

  Sam cocked her head to one side and pursed her lips. She’d told him that her phone didn’t work in the traditional sense, but he knew better now. The mom tracking thing.

  She rustled through her backpack to find a piece of paper and scribbled her cell phone number down, capped off with a little smiley face.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “Nuh uh. Text me.”

  He wasn’t much of a texter and was thoroughly unschooled in how to do it. But he nodded anyway. He wouldn’t be using the number to text anyway.

  Sam didn’t know that as she walked away. He watched her until she was lost in the crowd of cars.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Elmore put the phone back in its cradle with a grunt. He was not a man without connections, but even his contacts had come up empty-handed. He wanted to know where Sam lived, if only to do a drive-by and see if she was okay.

  It had been four days since seeing her. He was worried, more so with each passing day.

  There was one last call to make. One last favor he could call in.

  “John, it’s Elmore. I need a favor.”

  He sat in his car, two blocks away from the rundown motel parking lot. He’d been there for twenty-four minutes, and in that time observed three drug transactions. It was a slick affair. A car would pull into a space marked with a cone. Then a woman in a slinky outfit came out of a room and spoke to the man or woman driving the car.

  No money exchanged hands. Directions were given and the car disappeared for a moment, then reappeared behind the motel, where another girl in equally revealing wear took the money and delivered the goods.

  This second woman he recognized as Sam’s mother.

  Elmore stewed over the problem. It would be easy to pull into the marked spot and pretend he was a buyer. But then what? It was just as likely that the police might show up. How stupid would it look if he got arrested? How would that help Sam?

  And so he sat. An hour went by. Then another. No Sam. Just drug deals.

  He was getting hungry and had to go to the bathroom. Then the unavoidable happened. The downside of his treatment. He had to drive away for a few minutes to find a place to vomit. He returned minutes later, lightheaded and covered in sweat.

  I’ve missed her, I just know it, he thought, wiping his brow with a handkerchief he kept in his back pocket.

  He was just getting ready to stomp his way across the street when he heard the sound of a bus from behind. Turning in his seat, he saw an elderly couple walk onto the bus stop concrete, and then there she was – Sam.

  She had the seasoned look of a pro, glancing this way and that, collar pulled up just so.

  What now, Elmore?

  His paternal instincts took over. The same instincts that had saved his Marines. He started the car and did a quick U-turn, cursing to himself at the squeal of tires. More than one onlooker looked up from whatever it was they were doing. He was sure more than one motel blind was peeled open to see what the disturbance was.

  Sam saw it too.

  “Get in the car,” he said, passenger side window down, engine running.

  “Elmore…?”

  “Get in the car, Sam.”

  She glanced at the motel then back to him. He thought she was going to protest. He saw the conflict in her eyes.

  “Please, Sam,” he said, more gently this time.

  Like a prisoner who’d finally found her salvation, Sam opened the car door and shrank into the seat. She didn’t buckle her seatbelt and Elmore didn’t care. He wanted her as far away from this cursed place as he could get.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The crying started a mile away. He figured it must be the gravity of the situation. Or maybe she’d had a bad day. He didn’t want to pry. She’d tell him in time, or at least he hoped she would.

  “Hungry?” he asked when her silent tears subsided.

  Sam shook her head.

  They drove on, Elmore thinking.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked at one particularly long red light.

  “Can we go for a walk?”

  “Of course.”

  “At our park.”

  He grunted and made a U-Turn, red light be damned.

  The park was littered with children riding bikes and men and women in various forms of circuitous exercise. As soon as they got out of the car, Elmore could feel his young companion relax. He stepped onto the concrete path that meandered through the trees and over shallow hills. Sam looked up, closed her eyes, and sighed.

  Elmore waited until her eyes opened and she looked at him.

  “Okay. I’m ready.”

  As they made their way around the first turn, barely registering the activity all around them, Sam told her story.

  She walked slowly as she talked, parsing her words along with the rhythm of their feet on the pavement.

  “No kid really wants to be free,” she said. “I’d hear other kids talk about their parents – how strict they were. I would’ve killed for that kind of strictness. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice staying up as late as I wanted and eating all kinds of junk. But I didn’t enjoy the sounds of my mom getting it on with one nameless man after another in the other room. I grew up fast, you know?

  “We were on assistance. I came to school one time too many without lunch and someone noticed. They gave this form for mom to fill out. I didn’t want her to, so I did. They gave me a card and from then on, I got my lunch. I got made fun of. My card looked different from everyone else’s. Why do you suppose they do that? I mean, don’t they know kids have enough to deal with?

  “We moved about ten times, and each move was worse than the last one. The last place was this never-ending freak show. Strangers in and out of the place. No one ever bathed. It was really gross. I kept to my room and read magazines. In the morning I’d go into the kitchen and find coke residue all over the table. And then, there was money. A lot of it. Mom was dealing.”

  She’d broken off, lost in trails of thought and memory.

  “I don’t like going home,” she said after a moment.

  Elmore understood. He felt pain radiating off the strong young woman. He didn’t want to ask, but he had to. He had to know.

  “Did she ever… did any of them ever hurt you?”

  Sam didn’t look up.

  “My mom hits me sometimes. She’s not very strong, but it hurts. I’ve learned when she’s mad to just stay away. It’s the... the others that really hurt. To this day I don’t know if they were boyfriends or customers.”

  Elmore’s heart broke for the girl. Cancer was nothing compared to what this child had been through. Why wasn’t there a quiet island for discarded children to live out their lives in peace, free of the pain of broken adulthood?

  A question ate away at his insides.

  “How did they hurt you, Sam?”

  Still she didn’t look up. She licked her lips. Her mouth sounded sticky and parched.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  Every inch of Elmore’s body trembled. He felt his fists clenching involuntarily, his jaw clamping.

  “I’m alright, Nix,” Sam said.

  He wanted to tell her that she wasn’t okay, that it wasn’t okay what had happened to her. Decent
parents didn’t do that to children.

  Then he stopped. He remembered. Hypocrite, he said to himself.

  “Can I tell you a story?” he said.

  Sam nodded, picking up an errant dodge ball and tossing it back to a group of youngsters.

  Elmore pushed down his disgust for what he’d heard. It was no use at this juncture. No. He had to tell her. She thought he was some sort of saint. A cancer-ridden, weak-jointed saint.

  “I have a son,” he said, finally.

  Now she looked up.

  “You said your wife couldn’t have children.”

  Elmore nodded gravely, the pain of what he was about to say bubbling through his laboring lungs.

  “That is what I said. But I do have a son.”

  “How?”

  “We adopted.”

  “Oh. You said had?”

  The flashes of memory almost made him stop walking. He thought he was going to faint. It took a few breaths before he could explain.

  “That’s what I said. And no, he didn’t die.” Now or never, he thought. “I did a bad thing, Sam.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  They sat themselves down on a bench and watched park-goers. Sam sat with her hands folded in her lap, as still as he’d ever seen her. She looked like she was in church.

  Finally, he began. “We adopted a healthy baby boy. A teenage mother had given him up. He had these blue eyes. Deep blue. You never saw blue like this. Eyes as blue as the ocean. It was the happiest Eve had ever been.” He paused to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye and chuckled. “Look at me misting up now. I’m telling you, Sam, you should’ve seen her. She was a natural. She knew exactly what to do, from the diapers to the bottles. What a pro, my Eve.”

  “They say having a child changes you. For years, I thought that had to do with biology – that it only happened with the woman, and it couldn’t happen with an adoption anyway. But that child changed me.”

  “What did you name him?” said Sam, staring straight ahead.

  Anxiety roiled in his gut. He hadn’t uttered the name in years. What power it held over him still. “Oliver,” he said weakly.

  Sam nodded her head. “Oliver Nix. Has a nice ring to it.”

  “We joined a social group for parents and adopted children. There were potlucks and game nights. Sometimes we’d take a trip to the aquarium. There was always a holiday party. The idea was to get the kids used to hearing the word adoption and having them associate it with this community of good people and fun times. We were always open about it. And so... Oliver... grew into an understanding of what it means to be adopted. There wasn’t any one specific time that I can remember when we sat him down and told him the truth. We lived the truth. He was our son. Adopted was just a word.”

  “Oliver grew into a smart boy. Talented in sports, art, drama. Never got anything less than a B+ in school. In turn, we lumped our love onto him.”

  “Sounds like a good kid,” said Sam.

  Elmore smiled. “He was.”

  He wanted the story to end there.

  “Tell me what happened,” Sam said plainly. She sounded like Eve, that combination of compassion and no-nonsense steadfastness.

  “I don’t do well with change,” Elmore said, rubbing the back of his hand absently. “You know me by now, Sam. You know that.”

  She nodded as he went on, firmly stuck in the flow of his story.

  “He’d gone off to college. University of Chicago. It was when he came home for winter break that there was a disagreement, a rare thing in our family. Oliver wound up storming out of the house. Eve wanted me to go after him but I said that boys just need time to cool off. He stayed with a friend that night and went back up to school the next day without saying goodbye. He sent for his things. After that... well, that was it.”

  “What was it about?”

  “The argument? I don’t remember how it started. Politics, probably. We never saw eye to eye on that. But we debated each other fairly. I guess it just escalated that night. I just didn’t know how to give him what he wanted.”

  “I don’t get it. What did he want?”

  Elmore looked up to the fountain in the center of the park, as if his son were about to emerge from it and answer the question himself.

  He exhaled, remembering the pain like a lasting wound to the chest.

  “I didn’t understand, that’s all. He wanted me to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  Now his eyes drifted to Sam.

  “I loved my son very much, Sam. So much that it still hurts to think about it.” His eyes went back to the fountain, imagining the last image he’d ever had of his son. It wasn’t the anger or even the storming out of the house. It was the look. At that moment, his son was alone, and it showed on the boy’s face. Then he was gone, never to return.

  “Sam,” he said after the image threatened to undo him completely, “I didn’t give Oliver a chance to show me who he really was.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  They just sat there for a long while. Elmore imagining, Sam just waiting.

  The sun went down before they moved. It was the growl of Sam’s stomach that did it, shook Elmore from his trance.

  “Will you look at me, staring off into space? I’m sorry, Sam.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Elmore shook his head, getting to his feet.

  “Let’s go back home and I’ll get us some dinner cooked up.”

  “Can I help?”

  He looked at her and smiled. “More than you realize.”

  Sam did all the talking as they chopped and scooped their way to the dinner table. No questions about Elmore’s son. Nothing about Sam’s mother. Mundane topics. The latest rumors at school. A funny thing she’d seen on YouTube.

  Elmore relished it; he’d missed this kind of lightness in his life.

  When they’d gotten their fill, pushed back from the dinner table, Elmore knew there was no getting around it. “What do you want me to do about your mother, Sam?”

  She pursed her lips in thought. “It’s a funny thing, family. Don’t you think?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “Right? As a kid, you assume your parents love you, and you love your parents, no matter what. Yeah, I’m like a teenager? And teenagers are supposed to be like all antsy and on the cusp of adulthood? But really we’re just kids.”

  Sam was a walking contradiction. Here was the child out of the skin of the adult-before-her-time that he saw at the banquet.

  “My mom’s not a bad person, deep down. At least that’s what I think. She’s never been to treatment, and I don’t think she’d ever go. Sorry, I’m just thinking out loud now.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She was trying to be so strong, but Elmore saw the sadness there.

  “But… like…”

  “Just say it, Sam.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. She couldn’t look at him. “I’m ashamed.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know. I really do. But she’s still my mother.”

  “That doesn’t excuse what she’s done.”

  That thought hung in the air for a long time.

  “I don’t want to go back.”

  The finality of the statement moved something in Elmore. He wanted to protect her, but until that moment, he hadn’t been given the authority. Like a witness asking to be put in protection, Sam had just bequeathed her safety to Elmore.

  “We’ll take on life… together.”

  Sam nodded, tried to smile.

  Then she asked something Elmore never expected.

  “Can I help you find your son, too?”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  One night turned to two. Elmore plotted, made some calls while Sam hunkered down. It was a good thing it was the weekend, or there’d be school to contend with. It wasn’t like it was in Elmore’s days. Truancy was a serious matter now. Monday would be another story. Sam would either have to go to school, a place
easily tracked by her mother and the school district, or they could come up with a plan.

  “I need to run to the store,” Elmore said, frustrated. They were no closer to a solution. Sam’s mother probably needed to be arrested and put in treatment but Sam would have none of it. There was still that shred of love there, despite everything her mother had put her through. It still made Elmore nauseous just to think of it. The sick denting of her emotions that messed with her sense of loyalty.

  “I can come with you,” Sam offered.

  “No, why don’t you stay here.”

  Sam rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I guess I should stay and do the dishes. It is my turn.”

  Elmore would’ve been happy to have her come along on any other day, but today he had an extra errand to run.

  He was back in less than an hour, groceries in two bags, enough for two breakfasts, three lunches and a pair of dinners.

  His first indication that something was off was the front door left ajar. He’d locked it. He always did.

  Maybe Sam went for a walk, he told himself. But she would’ve locked, or at least closed the door.

  As he got closer to the front of his house, he saw the crack in the doorframe. The grocery bags fell to the ground as he rushed forward, pushing his way through the door without a thought.

  There was Sam, sitting on the couch, hands in her lap. But she wasn’t alone. Her mother was sitting next to her, holding a cigarette in one hand, the thin line of smoke trailing up to the ceiling.

  “What are you doing in my house?” he asked.

  “I told you to stay away from my daughter, old man,” Sam’s mother said.

  “Get out of my house.”

  The woman cackled a raspy sound, the remnants of a thousand and one smokes and tokes.