by Sara Shepard
She walked to the window and pulled back a curtain. The sunlight barreled its way in, showing off every crack in the windowsill, every stain on the carpet, every yellowed blotch of water damage on the ceiling. I watched as Samantha gazed around the room, taking in its pieces. I’d done the same thing when I had come to live with Stella over a year ago, trying to match the room to the mental image I’d been carrying around for years. The living room was smaller. There were more pictures of Frank Sinatra. I hadn’t recalled the curio cabinet above the mantel with the little crystal figurines-a leaping dolphin, an owl, a turtle-or the complete set of encyclopedias from 1965.
Samantha gingerly crossed her legs. I sat down on the poky blue upholstered chair near the dining room, which smelled like stale cigarettes and root beer barrel candies. ‘So I have been so, so busy,’ Samantha sighed. ‘It’s been constant work since I’ve started, which is a really good thing, of course. The Northglenn area is absolutely on fire. Everyone wants in. They just built a new hospital, they’re splitting the schools in two, and there’s this wonderful gym up on the hill that just opened, too. It’s just so…chill. I got them to teach yoga classes there!’
‘Yoga!’ Stella repeated. With some difficulty, she raised her arms into a Y, like she was doing a cheer. Gimme a Y for Yoga.
‘There are adorable little developments,’ Samantha went on, the words tumbling out of her fast. ‘That’s mostly where I’m selling. To young couples, like Chris and me. Neighbors of ours, in fact! The houses that have cropped up around us are just lovely. They have built in barbecue grills and side basketball courts. They’re brand new. I always tell customers that a new house is the best. You can put your own stamp on it, you know?’
Stella gave her a dippy smile, seeming perplexed.
‘Where is Northglenn, anyway?’ I asked.
‘It’s just past State College,’ Samantha said.
I drew a map in my head. ‘So it’s not that far away,’ I said slowly, so perhaps Stella would get it.
‘Yes, but it’s not the best highway,’ Samantha said. ‘Lots of accidents.’
And then she started up again, taking a deep breath. ‘So Chris sends his regards, of course. He would have loved to come but he couldn’t spare the day, obviously. It’s busy, busy, busy with all the building he’s doing.’ She pantomimed wiping the sweat off her brow. ‘He comes home so bushed every night.’
At the word bushed, I stood. Samantha’s eyes lingered on me for a split second. We’d only talked on the phone before this. Each phone conversation had been the same: Samantha reiterated how badly she wanted to see us, but she was just so busy. First, because she and her husband, Chris, were buying a new house. Then, because she was studying for her realtor’s license. Then, because she was selling houses. And more houses. And more houses. For some reason, I couldn’t quite imagine Samantha selling real houses-little plastic green ones from Monopoly seemed more plausible. People came to her real estate office, all prepared to look for a threebedroom, two-bath, and Samantha held the little game piece between her hands and said, You don’t want that. You want this.
At the end of each phone call, Stella loomed in the kitchen, weakly reaching out for the receiver. I told Samantha that Stella wanted to talk, but Samantha always said she had another call coming in. Or a client had just walked into her office. Or Chris needed something, urgently. When I went to hang up the phone, a little flurry of hurt crossed Stella’s face, but she quickly distracted herself by scratching the skin under her wig, or digging through her box of cassette tapes for something by Elvis, or tickling her slobbering pug, Nelson, on his belly.
‘I’ve gotten Chris on this vitamin program,’ Samantha went on. ‘There’s a health store that opened across town, too, which I tell my clients is a really, really good thing because that indicates wealth in a community, you know? The whole McDonald’s phenomenon-the poorer people are, the worse they eat. Because, you know, McDonald’s is cheap. And…fattening. If people want to eat better, it means they have more money.’
‘But vitamins aren’t food,’ I offered. ‘They’re…pills.’
Derailed, Samantha scratched the edge of her chin. ‘Well, anyway. They have the most amazing selection of vitamins and herbs, and I’ve told Chris that if he’s going to be working such long hours and feel so stressed, he should get his body into balance. I’m trying to get him to yoga too but you know, he is a man.’
‘I’ve tried vitamins,’ Stella piped up.
Samantha’s forehead creased. ‘…Really?’
Stella’s eyes gleamed excitedly. ‘They were the size and smell of a horse’s asshole. I practically couldn’t swallow them. Made the inside of my mouth smell like a barn. Now, what if I wanted to kiss a man? He wouldn’t want to come near me, my mouth smelling like manure.’
Samantha’s mouth dropped open a little.
‘It’s true!’ Stella looked at me. ‘Tell her, Summer. Tell her about the men that kiss me.’
‘There are lots of them,’ I said. Stella liked to kiss men on TV, crawling up to the screen and suffering through a few moments of static to get her mouth close to their faces.
‘Chris takes vitamin E, vitamin A, and vitamin C,’ Samantha said. This person she’d become. ‘And then he takes a multi. I think it’s really been working for him. I take them too, of course. And calcium. Do you take calcium, Stell?’
‘What were the things I took, Summer?’ Stella asked. ‘The asshole pills? It was a vitamin that wasn’t a letter.’
‘Well, I mean, you take lots of vitamins,’ I explained, searchingly. ‘You’re supposed to. I think you’re thinking of the herbs.’
‘That was right around when I did that walk for breast cancer,’ Stella said. She glanced at me, sheepish. ‘Or, well, started that walk for breast cancer. There were too many people to finish. I thought it would be more like…oh, I don’t know. A parade. Everyone was walking so damn fast! I would think you’d want everyone to look at you, not just whiz right by.’
The cuckoo clock in the dining room chimed out the hour. The truth about the breast cancer walk was that Stella had been in terrible pain that day. She’d stood at the start, all ready to walk, but then went pale and grabbed my hand. ‘Honey,’ was all she needed to say. We moved to the sidelines fast. Children stared at us. Other people looked away. Shortly after that, the doctors put her on a low dose of morphine.
Samantha ran her hand through her hair. ‘I brought you a present, Stell.’ She pulled out a fat romance novel. There was a woman on the cover, her breasts tumbling out of her corset. She had windswept hair and a troubled, I-have-to-make-a-huge-life-or-death-decision-about-my-kingdom expression. ‘You used to love this series, remember?’
‘She’s not reading that much,’ I butted in.
Samantha looked at me sharply. ‘Well, why not? It’s probably good for her.’
‘It’s true, I’m not reading much,’ Stella admitted. ‘TV is far more interesting these days. My favorite show is Road Rules.’
Samantha wrinkled her nose. ‘Really?’
‘Oh, it’s so good,’ Stella said. ‘We’ll have to watch it later-it’s so deliciously nasty. It’s just the kind of show you’d like.’
One of Samantha’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I don’t think so.’
Stella pursed her lips. ‘Well. Maybe not anymore.’
There was a catch in her voice. Samantha looked startled, as though she’d been slapped.
My gaze ping-ponged from Stella to Samantha, not sure what would happen next, but hoping, maybe, for an altercation. But Samantha just stared down at her purse, running her fingers along its brass grommets.
According to Stella, Samantha left Cobalt when she turned eighteen. Just disappeared. Stella had a lot of excuses for it. She was like that when she was young, after all-she never played by the rules. Then, during the time my father was suffering through the worst of his depression, Samantha called Stella out of the blue. She was working as a legal secretary, she said. She’d just got
ten married on a cruise ship to a man named Chris; he developed townhouses in Central Pennsylvania.
I asked Stella if she’d seen Samantha since she took off, and Stella shrugged and said Samantha had only come back once to retrieve her savings bonds from the safe-deposit box and haul away the rosewood chest that had belonged to her parents. When she visited, she dropped off a few wedding photos, and, after enough pestering, Stella finally showed them to me. I was stunned to discover that all of Chris’s family had attended the wedding ceremony, boarding the cruise ship for the afternoon when it docked in Miami. Stella slowly pointed out each family member, saying both very little and so very much. ‘Here’s his mother, his father, his grandmother, his great-aunt,’ she recited. She squinted viciously at the great-aunt. ‘Good Lord. What idiot wears black to a wedding at sea?’
‘Do you want something to eat?’ I asked Samantha, heading toward the kitchen. ‘A sandwich? A soda?’
‘Oh, goodness, Chris forbids me to drink soda,’ Samantha said quickly, desperate to break the conversational void. ‘Do you have any fruit?’
‘We have grape jelly.’
‘I want a glass of wine,’ Stella called from the living room.
Samantha ran her hands over the crystal candy dish, which had a fine layer of dust on its bumpy edges. ‘I don’t really drink wine, either,’ she said quietly. ‘It gives you wrinkles.’
‘Sweetie, you’re so pretty, you have so many years until you get wrinkles,’ Stella called out. ‘Summer, get us wine, okay?’
‘We don’t have any.’
‘Break out that bottle on the top of the fridge.’
I walked back into the living room. ‘You can’t have wine. You can have an iron pill. That’s it.’
Stella rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll sip. Slowly. Give me a thimbleful.’
I turned back for the kitchen. There was the same peeling alphabet wallpaper that had been here when I visited for my grandmother’s funeral. The same lopsided cabinets, an even bigger accumulation of thermometers and bags of charcoal and garage sale crap on the back porch. There was indeed a dust-covered bottle of wine on top of the fridge. I pulled it down and searched the silverware drawer for a corkscrew. Samantha hovered near the kitchen table, pulling her cell phone’s antenna in and out. I could hear Stella grunting in the other room, and hoped she wasn’t trying to come in here. It always took a huge effort for her to move from room to room. ‘Are you okay?’ I called to her.
‘I’m fine, fine,’ she said.
‘We’ll be there in a second.’
This morning, Stella had been so excited Samantha was coming. Samantha had finally carved out a niche in her busy schedule to see us! How fortuitous that she had a conference in Ohio, and that the drive took her right by Cobalt! ‘I hope she remembers how to get here,’ Stella said, worried. ‘Do you think she’ll remember to look for the McDonald’s off the interstate? The one with the really high golden arches?’
I helped her put on makeup. She pulled on her gloves and slid her feet into her green high heels and dug out a set of blue plastic dumbbells to keep on her lap, perhaps to make Samantha think she’d just been working out. And then, after she was ready, I found her on the living room floor, clutching her side. ‘Again?’ I asked. ‘Again,’ she said.
She insisted that she didn’t want to take something that would completely knock her out, so I suggested she take a bath to relax. I filled up the tub with bubble bath, laid out her red and black robe, and spritzed Charlie perfume, her favorite, around the bathroom. She told me that when she was younger, she used to take bubble baths all the time, with Skip perched on the toilet, admiring her. She would smoke cigarettes, he would drink Scotch, and sometimes he would climb into the tub with her. ‘Those were the good years,’ she sighed.
I pulled the wine cork out of the bottle. A cough of dust came up as well. I poured a shot-glass-full for Stella, and found chipped tumblers for Samantha and myself. ‘We don’t have any real wine glasses,’ I said, noticing Samantha looking at the tumblers with disdain.
‘Well, you should get some,’ Samantha insisted. ‘Wine glasses aren’t very expensive.’
‘They’d go to waste.’
‘Every house needs wine glasses.’ Samantha returned to the living room and perched daintily on the couch next to Stella. ‘I always send my clients wine glasses when they move into their new home. It’s such a chill way to celebrate, you know?’
I eyed her carefully. I wasn’t sure I’d heard the word chill used so often in such a small span of time, not even when Andy Elkerson came over to repair the air-conditioning unit. But as she and I continued to nervously watch one another, I wondered if Samantha was smarter than I thought. Even though Stella and I had never talked about it, Stella very well could have told Samantha about my father and the hospital. It was possible, too, that Stella had theorized with Samantha why I was really, truly here, caring for her. Every time Samantha glanced in my direction, I thought I could see it in her face-the pity, the self-satisfaction of how her life had turned out so differently from mine.
I handed Stella the tumbler, and she belted it back fast. I felt like I should go and clean something, or prepare something, or hide Stella’s medications. ‘I didn’t know every house needed wine glasses,’ Stella said, picking up on the conversation. ‘I’m trying to remember if I own any.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ Samantha cooed.
‘Then where are they?’ Stella wondered aloud, adjusting the Magic Bag on her belly. It was a bean-filled cloth bag that we kept in the freezer. We’d recently bought a new cover for it, a scene of the night sky, complete with cartoonish planets. ‘I don’t recall owning a single wine glass.’
Samantha slapped her knees with her palms. ‘You know what? I think we should have an outing. Go get you some new wine glasses.’
‘Samantha…’ I whined.
‘That sounds like a good idea,’ Stella said creakily.
‘We could go to the Wreston mall,’ Samantha suggested.
‘Oh, honey, no,’ Stella said. ‘That place burned down.’
‘Really?’ Samantha scratched her head. ‘Well, where else is there?’
Stella and I looked at each other. ‘Well, there’s Wal-Mart,’ Stella said. ‘They have everything.’
Samantha winced-Wal-Mart probably wasn’t what she was imagining. But what did she expect? This was Cobalt. ‘Well then.’ Her tone was brisk. ‘Wal-Mart it is.’
‘Do you feel well enough?’ I asked Stella.
‘Of course,’ Stella said sharply, weakly making a muscle with her arm. ‘Fit as a fiddle.’
I resisted laughing. ‘Maybe we should go to Wal-Mart tomorrow. We should just rest today. We could go before we take off on our trip.’
‘Where are you going?’ Samantha asked.
‘Summer’s taking me somewhere so I can smoke grass!’ Stella cried.
Samantha looked startled. ‘No, I’m not,’ I reminded Stella. I faced Samantha. ‘I told you about this on the phone, remember? I’m taking her to this…doctor, sort of. Near Lancaster.’
‘He’s a drug dealer!’ Stella announced. ‘He smokes with you!’
‘He makes you breathe in things,’ I corrected her. ‘Healing things. Not…marijuana. He’s Native American, I think. His name is Cheveyo. It means “spirit warrior” in some tribal language.’
Samantha pursed her lips and turned her wedding ring around and around on her finger.
‘And before we go, we’re also going to see the jackalope,’ Stella added.
‘Maybe we’ll see the jackalope,’ I said. ‘If we have time.’
‘…jackalope?’ Samantha asked weakly.
‘Oh, it’s amazing,’ Stella gushed. ‘You’ll never see anything like it in your life.’
Samantha blinked furiously. Finally, she pointed at Stella’s black satin gloves. ‘Why are you wearing those? You are cold, aren’t you?’
‘Not at all, dear.’ Stella turned her wrists under.
Sama
ntha pursed her pink lips. ‘What are those even made out of?’ She reached and pulled at the very tip of the left glove’s thumb. Stella made a pained noise.
‘Samantha, don’t,’ I said sharply.
The glove bagged around Stella’s thin arms, so Samantha barely had to pull to get it off. Stella slithered around to hide her arm, but we all got a good look at the bruises. There were the green spots in the crook of her elbow, the purplishblue welts by her wrist, the black blotches on the top of her palm, not from any recent hospital visits-she’d finally given in and gotten a chemo port-but from months ago. Not unusual, for all the treatments she’s had, the doctor assured us. Chemotherapy makes you bruise very easily.
It was as if a curtain had been ripped back. Samantha fell silent, letting the satin glove drop to the table. I snatched it up and handed it back to Stella, who shoved it on her arm as quickly as she could, which wasn’t as fast as she’d have liked.
‘I just like the gloves,’ Stella said stubbornly. ‘I think they’re pretty. All right?’
‘Of course,’ Samantha said quickly. It seemed like she was becoming less whole before our eyes, the way a photo bleached out in the sun. She cleared her throat. ‘You know, if we want to go to Wal-Mart, we should go today. Because I really should leave later this evening. My conference starts really early tomorrow morning, and I should get there as soon as I can.’
‘But we have your bedroom ready for you,’ Stella protested. It was true-we had been under the impression that Samantha was going to stay the night.
‘No, I was always leaving today. I didn’t say that?’ Samantha smoothed her hand over the lacy doily on the coffee table, avoiding looking at us. ‘They really need me at my conference. And I’m up for an award.’
‘An award!’ Stella weakly clapped her hands. ‘Well, then! What kind of award?’
‘A…real-estate award.’ Samantha looked at me, her eyes pleading.
I could tell she’d just tacked this on in a panic. Stella had probably caught on to this already, I realized next. But we both gave in. What was the point of arguing? ‘Well, all right,’ I said. ‘I guess we could go today. Stella, you up for going to Wal-Mart today?’
