by Nancy Adams
“I suppose I always end up falling into character whenever I recount my time with them. Plus, I never cuss—they cussed a lot, Claire—and it was something that took me a year or two at MIT to break the habit of. But every time I begin talking about them, I begin cussing like a sailor. You know, my old man…”
“Like that,” Claire interrupted.
“Like what?”
“The way you just said, ‘My old man.’ I like that. Usually your accent is so Ivy League, but just now you could have been any working man.”
“Well,” Sam began slowly, “at MIT I learned to adapt my accent to suit my peers.”
“You should speak with your natural accent,” Claire remarked. “It makes you more real.”
Sam smiled at Claire for a moment, before he abruptly remembered where he was and the smile quickly dropped.
“But back to the story,” Sam said, taking a sip of his coffee. “A simple day with them would consist of my old man coming in from work. He’d bound into the house in the early evening expecting his dinner on the table even though he was at least an hour late. My ma would be like, ‘What the fuck time you call this you sorry son-of-a-bitch? They said at the office that you’d all come in from the forest hours ago. You been down Millers drinking your overtime again, while I been here tending to these little devils like the good wife.’” Claire was giggling wildly at this point, squirming in her seat. “And he’d answer, ‘Oh would you leave off, ya fuckin’ harpy. My overtime’s mine to spend how I like. You and them brats get my salary and I get my overtime. I break my back for yous and then I break it again. And you know why I break it again? Sos I can get a little for myself—some comfort from it all and not just throw it all at you and them kids. A man’s gotta have something of his own, woman.’ They’d then row for a while and the old man’d finally go sit in front of the television until he fell asleep, my ma bleating and pissing blood the whole time, breaking out in argument every now and then and the old man screaming at her, ‘For Christ’s sake, woman! What you wanna keep raking them fucking coals up for?’”
Claire was laughing garishly by now. She loved the way he had suddenly just loosened up in front of her as he played the parts of his parents. She sensed a comfort developing between them that she had rarely ever felt with a man before.
“You exaggerate,” she giggled.
“No, I swear,” Sam smiled at her. “They really were like that. Like I said, I’ve got a photographic memory. Heck, when I was just explaining it to you, I was even seeing them there in front of me, all up in each other’s faces.”
Sam suddenly paused and let out a sigh. His smile was once again dropping almost the moment it was coming into full bloom upon his face.
“You know they never split up or divorced,” he said in a sad tone. “My old man, for all his drinking, never sought another woman, and for every time he threatened to leave for good, he never spent one night outta that house.”
“Where are they now?”
“Who, my folks?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re dead, Claire,” Sam answered with blank finality.
“Oh! I’m so sorry.”
The girl’s innocence had amused Sam then.
“You don’t have to apologize for their deaths,” he smiled.
Claire blushed, and the two sat beaming at one another for a moment, until Claire shuddered and asked, “Was there any other people in your family that showed genius?”
“No,” was Sam’s frank reply. “All of them dropped out of high school with nothing more than the memories of the good times they had. They either sunk straight into the same lives as my folks, or spiced it up a bit by getting into crime. One of my brothers, Dwayne, is currently serving time for aggravated burglary.”
“I know,” Claire let out. “There was some cheap television documentary on it.”
“Oh! I knew that parts of the press had covered it, but I didn’t know that someone had gone to the bother of making a TV program. I remember USA Today writing a front page article entitled, ‘Sam Burgess – Secret Socialist and his Crime Family.’ That was a good one.”
“Yeah, they fear anyone using their power for good, instead of propping up the status quo.”
“Anyway,” Sam continued, wanting to move away from a political discussion, “I didn’t fit in with the people back home, as well as my own family. I was something of a black sheep; an anomaly within the gene pool. I spent most of my childhood in the houses of my friends, kids that were what you’d term ‘nerds’. That’s how I first got into computers. You know, years later, I even investigated whether I was adopted or simply misplaced at the hospital.”
Claire laughed.
“I’m serious,” Sam insisted. “I paid my brother, Mikey, a thousand dollars to give a blood sample for DNA analysis.”
“And were you?” Claire asked in surprise.
“No,” Sam grinned. “I was one hundred percent his brother. I didn’t go so far as getting samples from my folks.”
As she sat crying at the base of the tree, it was this conversation that Claire now placed her finger upon as marking the start of their affair. It was the moment that she had felt the slow blooming light suddenly emerge from its bud and blossom into all its glory inside of her. It was naught but his simple family history, so far from what you’d expect from a man as powerful as Sam, that had made him so humble and approachable in her eyes—that he had once experienced the thin wedge of life for himself during his youth and wasn’t just another all-American story of riches to riches. She felt amazed that he had climbed from such a place, gone to MIT at the age of fourteen and made his first millions by the age of eighteen when he and some friends had invented the first prototype code for what we now know as the internet search engine. From there, Sam Burgess had helped shape humanity’s future. His company, Techsoft, was a global phenomenon—a torchbearer of mankind.
Claire wiped away her tears and stood up. She began looking around her, searching the dense field of trees with her eyes. It was then that she saw Sam approaching slowly. The sight of him instantly set ablaze a flutter in her heart and she shuddered at the base thought that she truly loved this man. She instantly attempted to bury the thought and a lump of ash formed in her throat when she considered that she was destined to never see him again after today. At least not in any romantic capacity.
“I’m so sorry, Claire,” Sam said as he reached her, a sorrowful look on his face. “I’ve placed a weight on your shoulders that I had no right to place there. If you wish it, I will never see you again…”
At the sound of this final word, Claire lurched forward from the tree and took ahold of him in her arms, crying desperately at the thought that they were destined to part, but knowing that it was how this was meant to end. She was feeling herself slip away from the light, and in her desolation, she had grabbed onto him. Sam, meanwhile, merely stood there with a resigned smile of discomfort on his face, realizing that this was it.
All of a sudden, his phone went off in his pocket and Claire let go of him.
Wiping her eyes, she sniffed, “You should probably answer that. It’ll be the hospital.”
Sam took his phone out and, sure enough, it was the hospital, so he answered it.
“Mr. Burgess,” Dr. Jones said the moment Sam answered, “you have to come back to the hospital. It’s bad, I’m afraid.”
Sam put the phone down and slid it back into his pocket, a despondent look upon his face. For a moment, he gazed at the patch of ground that existed between him and Claire, saying nothing, Claire standing several feet off of him, trembling, looking across at Sam with terrified eyes.
“It was Jones,” he said after a while, not removing his eyes from the space, his lips trembling. “I have to go back, so I need to leave right away. I’ll send the helicopter back for you when I reach Denver. Would you like me to walk you back to the house before I leave?”
“No,” Claire answered swiftly. “I want to remain in these woods
for a while longer.”
Sam looked up at her for a second before facing the ground once more.
“I’ll instruct the pilot to come looking for you,” he said sheepishly.
“It’s okay,” she replied nonchalantly. “I just need another twenty minutes on my own and I’ll head back to the house. You should get going.”
“Okay,” was all Sam could manage, and he walked off toward the house.
Claire watched him leave with a terrible abyss opening up inside her gut the farther he walked away. Fresh tears began to flow from her eyes and her body trembled with the awful grief of it all. Her young heart was well and truly broken, and she blamed only herself for it. It was an impossible situation that she had found herself in, and she should have left it alone the moment it was obvious that their passions were moving them to places they shouldn’t be going. It served her right, she thought, that she should feel so forlorn watching him disappear within the trees.
It was then, as Sam reached the turning in the pathway, that he stopped and looked back over his shoulder, unable to resist the chance of taking one last look at Claire. The moment he did, and their eyes met across the field of trees, Claire’s heart missed a beat and the tears flowed with an even greater intensity.
CHAPTER THREE
Late that afternoon, Sam’s helicopter made it to the hospital roof. As the craft swooped over the surrounding streets, he looked out the window and saw the scores of media that had set themselves up outside; television vans, swarms of photographers and reporters all huddled together outside, like gulls hovering around the back of a fishing trawler. Even on some of the roofs of the surrounding buildings, paparazzi and other photographers had set themselves up to record his helicopter as it arrived.
When they landed, waiting for Sam on the roof was Dr. Jones, who had been alerted to his arrival. The minute Sam stepped out of the craft, Jones approached him and took him by the arm.
“I’m afraid her condition has worsened since you were gone,” the doctor said into Sam’s ear, attempting to make himself heard above the final wheezes of the helicopter’s engine.
“How so?” Sam asked, a look of concern on his face as the doctor led him off the roof and to the stairs.
“Her sense of touch has completely gone in the last two hours.”
Sam stopped where he was. A swift tremble made its way through him, and in that instant he hated himself more than ever for not having been there the moment the feeling in her hands had disappeared.
“Okay,” Sam said after a moment. “Take me to her.”
The doctor led him down the stairs and to the whole floor of the hospital that Sam had taken for the treatment. For a moment, the two men walked down a corridor lined with empty wards, and this produced another pang of guilt inside Sam as he thought of the selfishness that had driven him to procure a whole floor of a city hospital simply so he could enjoy a level of privacy from the baying mob. This place should have been filled with other patients, but instead it was filled with space. So what if he’d donated several million dollars to the hospital for the pleasure—something they were only too willing to accept—it was still a very selfish thing to do, and the empty beds that lined the place made him shudder with self-loathing.
As they reached the ward, Sam began to wonder where his head had been lately. He’d done so many things that were uncharacteristic of him. The whole affair with Claire was something that had happened completely out of the blue. He’d not been looking for anything when they’d met—although she did captivate him the moment he laid eyes on her. He had been so shrouded in darkness then that her light had blinded him the instant he’d seen it shining out of her that first time. It had drawn him in, and at first, he imagined that it was nothing but her innocence that he was seeing. This made him cringe now as he walked toward the closed doors of the ward. In retrospect, his subsequent movements to be close to her felt almost lecherous to him now. Even three weeks ago, at the beginning of the affair, he had felt that his actions were loathsome. But this loathsome feeling hadn’t stopped him from seeking her out.
The doctor opened the doors for him and Sam instantly felt the oppression of the room on the other side hit him. As he stepped over the threshold, his legs almost buckled under him and he wobbled slightly.
There, in the middle of the room, stood Marya’s bed with monitors of various kinds and hospital staff littered around it. In the center of the bed sat Marya—poor Marya, withered Marya, sick Marya, dying Marya. She had Jess in her arms and was holding her tight, as if the four-year-old child anchored her to the bed. Anchored her to this life.
When Sam was halfway, Marya instinctively looked over at him. A smile lit up on her face the moment she saw his approach and he, in turn, attempted to beam one back at her, but his sad face could only manage the softest of smiles. Jess looked up from her mother’s breast and saw her father’s approach.
“Daddy!” the little girl exclaimed and jumped out of her mother’s grasp.
The freckled little red haired girl trotted off the bed and ran across the floor to her father, who opened his arms wide and took with full force the brunt of his ecstatic little girl. The moment they made contact, Sam closed his arms around Jess and the little girl gripped onto her father. On the bed, Marya sat and watched the two with a sad grin on her forlorn face.
“Mummy can’t feel me anymore,” Jess whispered to her father as he held her. “Do you think she’ll be able to feel you?”
“Why would she be able to feel me and not you?” Sam asked his daughter.
“Because maybe her feelings work for some but not for others. You’ve known mummy longer, maybe she can feel you better.”
Sam smiled down at her and said, “But you grew out of mummy, so really the two of you should be closer.”
“Maybe,” the little girl said as she let go of Sam’s waist and took him instinctively by the hand.
Sam then walked with Jess the rest of the way to the bed, holding her tiny hand in his trembling grasp.
“You’re shaking, Daddy,” Jess said innocently, looking up at him as she did.
“Yes,” Sam acknowledged.
“Are you scared?”
Sam smiled down at her as they reached Marya, but didn’t say anything. Jess let go of his hand and bounded onto the bed, nestling herself once again into her sick mother. Sam, meanwhile, stood and watched them with a withered smile pursed upon his dry lips, a sadness breaking loose inside of him and making his legs even weaker.
Marya looked up at him and smiled weakly at the sight of her desolate husband. He had been so alone when she had originally found him all those years ago, and now he looked just as lonely as he had then. She’d watched that man blossom into something spectacular in the years since they’d first met when they were only fourteen. Then, she had looked at him as another of her father’s pet projects.
Marya’s father, Professor Brian Smith, was a leading programming lecturer at MIT. When the latest child genius had been accepted into the college, Professor Smith had offered up his family residence for the boy and it had been accepted. That first night, when she had looked at the lonely little boy sitting at the dining table opposite her, Marya could have never imaged the love that would grow between them over the next four years. That first time, she’d viewed him as someone that had been raised inside a box until that point, so nervous of the outside world did he seem. It had amazed her when she’d learnt later on that he came from a family of seven children in a working class neighborhood, and that two of his brothers had spent time in juvenile detention centers. This side of his life had intrigued the sheltered Marya and had been the basis of their original friendship.
“You look tired, Sam,” Marya said to him as she held Jess tightly within her numb arms. “Take a seat,” she added, signaling the end of the bed with a nod of her head.
Sam smiled and took the proffered place next to her on the bed, where he sat looking despondently at the space ahead of him. Meanwhile, beside him,
Jess began rubbing her mother’s arms with her small hands.
Looking up at Marya as she did it, Jess asked, “Can you feel that, mummy?”
Marya smiled down at her sweet cherub of a daughter and, as she did, she heard Sam burst out sobbing. She immediately turned to face her husband and saw that he was rocking back and forth, crying bitterly, his face screwed into a ball of sorrow, his arms tightly crossed, hands clutching onto the flanks of his suit jacket, holding himself. Jess quickly turned to her father as well and looked back up to her mother with a look of surprise. Marya nodded in Sam’s direction and the girl instantly took the cue, letting go of Marya, scooting across the bed and taking ahold of her father around the neck, nestling her little head into his shoulder.
“It’s okay, daddy,” she cooed into his ear.
Marya moved herself carefully across the bed, not wanting to snag her IV lines. Since her deteriorating nerves had begun to make her body feel numb, she had to be careful not to pull it out, as she couldn’t feel the needle’s movement under her skin any longer, nor the lines becoming taut and pulling at it.
When she reached Sam, Marya placed her arms around him and Jess. Sam immediately raised his own arms and took ahold of them both, shivering as he felt Marya’s cold waif body.
“I’m sorry,” Sam cried to them both.
“It’s okay,” Marya cooed into his ear as she rested her chin upon the top of his head.
“I should be stronger,” he let out.
“You are so much stronger than you’ll ever know,” Marya said to him, but this only had the result of making him cry even more, and he clutched ahold of Marya with more strength, she in turn holding him as tightly as she could, Jess buried between the two. Tears began to flow freely from Marya as she considered the absolute cold feeling that existed in the whole of her body. She closed her eyes tight, so that she could concentrate on the memory of the feeling of her family in her arms. But no matter how hard she tried to rediscover that feeling within her, she could sense nothing in her arms, not even the fact that they were outstretched. She may as well have been lying on her back in an ocean for all that she felt then.
