A/N: This story, like "Romantic at Heart" came to me the second I woke up, in its entirety. I just love when that happens! I must warn though, that there is one factual error that I had to grit my teeth and let slide- technically Maplehurst is a 2 years or less prison, thus someone wouldn't be in it for a particularly long time as mentioned in the story. But, the show name dropped it, so I had to use it just the same.
Apologies to those who've received two notices about this story. FF has not been kind to me today and deleted/withheld/something to the first version. I deleted it in an attempt to get this story out there. I'm hoping it will work this time. Clearly FF is my white whale. ;-)
Sam tore at a sugar packet and emptied its contents into his coffee. Swearing lightly under his breath he told himself that he was going to be calm today, patient even.
A teasing laugh echoed throughout the lounge room. He'd know that laugh anywhere.
"Shut up," he grumbled, not bothering to even turn and face his tormenter.
"Rough day ahead, Officer Swarek?" Andy asked, her voice riddled with laughter. She tucked herself in next to him and lightly bumped her hip against his. "Remember to be nice. He didn't mean to hit your truck this morning."
"He scratched Priscilla!"
"Your truck has a name?" Andy asked, dumbfounded.
Sam took a sip of his coffee as she giggled. "Priscilla?" Ever relentless. As usual the coffee tasted like tar. Perfect. He tossed it into the nearby garbage. A stop at Tim's was going to have to be worked into this day of torture.
"Hey Swarek?" Noelle called out from the door. "You have a call on line four."
Sam narrowed his eyes, confused and looked at Andy. She shrugged. Usually when people had to reach him, they called his cell. "You coming?" Noelle asked impatiently.
"Yah, yah." He gave Andy a light, quick punch. "That's for making fun of Priscilla," he called out as he jogged to catch up with Noelle who'd already made her way to the front desk.
Still laughing to herself, Andy deftly made herself a cup of coffee. Three sugars and three creams to offset the thick, stagnant taste.
"I'm dead!" Dov cried out as he entered the room and made his way to the vending machine. "Swarek's gonna kill me."
"Relax, it's just a scratch."
"A scratch that I did to his truck." Dissatisfied with the contents on display, he pressed the arrow on the keypad. "Plus I have to ride with him today. I'm so dead." He pressed the arrow a second time. "How does Swarek feel about Doritos?"
"McNally," Frank's voice boomed through the doorway. Andy turned quickly, nearly dropping her coffee in the process. "Get changed, you're going with Swarek." Confused, Andy looked down at her uniform and back up at Sam who'd moved in beside Frank. Changed in to what? "Epstein, you're with Diaz today." A faint "yes" sounded as Dov took off to find Chris.
"Sir, I don't understand." Andy shook her head and pulled at her vest.
"I've got to go to Maplehurst," Sam explained, his brows knotted.
"The jail? Another prisoner transfer?"
He shook his head, his jaw tightening. "No. My father died."
oOo
The bustling city quickly turned into patches of new housing developments, low rise factories and residential communities all interspersed among farms and Go Train lines. At some point when they'd passed Mississauga, Andy felt Sam's hand cover her own. Every so often she'd hear him sigh lightly or draw in a deep breath. But aside from those two sounds, not a word was spoken.
Maplehurst Correctional Facility was an hour away from the city and housed a mixture of minimum- and maximum-security prisoners, some of whom were awaiting trial and others who were serving longer sentences. As they took the winding road into the visitor's parking lot Andy took a chance and decided to break the silence.
"You didn't tell me your dad was at Maplehurst."
"What's there to tell?" Sam answered abruptly. "Bad stuff happens sometimes. You do drugs and deal in that stuff, it'll eventually catch up to you and you're going to have to do the time."
Andy nodded, unwilling to test the waters any further. It was obvious that there was something more underlying.
Once they'd been cleared by the Visitor's Centre, they were brought into a holding room. The walls were a stark white and two benches sat attached to a small steel picnic-style table. Andy followed Sam's lead and stood next to him. Within minutes a guard brought in a banker's box filled to capacity.
"Here you go Mr. Swarek. All of your father's stuff." The guard held up an oversized ziploc bag. "These are his personal effects that he came in with. Everything else is from his cell." Sam took the bag from the guard. "I'm just going to have you sign this paperwork to acknowledge that you've taken ownership." With a quick jab, a squiggle and a line, Sam signed the document.
"Feel free to use this room to go through it. Anything you don't want you can put in the trash bin by the door." They nodded. The guard paid his respects and left them alone in the room.
Sam opened the bag first. Inside was his father's wedding band and wallet, along with some clothes. "Can you put this in your purse?" Sam asked sliding the ring over to Andy. "Sarah'll probably want it, I guess. Or she can sell it." Andy complied, but remained silent, slipping the ring into her wallet.
Sam moved on to the box, leaving his father's wallet unopened. Picking up a handful of magazines that had been standing upright, he gave a slight chuckle, lightening the mood for a moment. "Guess Dad kept busy." He showed Andy the cover. Busty Beauties. She gave a snort and reached for the wallet.
"This you?" She held up a photo of a young boy, dark hair mussed, arms around an older man's neck.
"Garbage." Sam said simply, barely giving the photo a second glance.
"It says 'Sammy 1985' on the back."
"Garbage."
Andy shook her head, defiant. "This? This is going in my purse."
Moving across from Sam, she started to help him sort through the box. Much to her chagrin, it looked as though Sam was putting more things in the trash pile.
"What's this?" She asked, pulling out what looked to be the lid to something. She flipped it over. "You've got to be kidding me!"
Sam looked up. "Garbage."
"Pistachio ice cream?" She pointed to the faded label. "That story is true?" Sam shrugged, took the lid from Andy and put it next to Busty Beauties in the trash pile.
"I told you, garbage."
"Sam," She said, pulling at his elbow. "You can't toss everything."
"Watch me."
"Sam. C'mon," Andy pleaded. "You've got to keep something of your dad's."
"I'm keeping the ring, aren't I?"
"No," she corrected. "You're giving it to your sister. That doesn't count."
"Whatever." Sam grabbed the trash pile from the table and put it back in the box. "It's all junk anyway. Tell me Andy, what am I going to do with old jeans, ice cream lids, magazines and audio books?" He grabbed at a black and white box and held it up to prove his point. "Garbage. It's easy. Just like Dad threw away our family."
"Sam." Andy shook her head. "I'm sure it's not like that." She reached for his arm, but he shrugged her off.
"It's fine. I've had a lifetime to deal with it." Sam picked up the banker's box and dropped it in the trash bin. "Can we just go now?" He knocked on the glass pane of the door and a guard buzzed it open. Wasting little time, he exited the room.
Andy gathered her purse and followed him. As she was about to close the door behind her she noticed the face of the black and white box that Sam had held up, poking up from the trash bin. Moby Dick.
"It's just the longest book I could find."
"It helps put me to sleep."
She knew it'd looked familiar.
"McNally? You moving in?" Sam's voice echoed from the corridor.
"Coming!" She grabbed the tapes from the trash and let the door close behind her.
oOo
Andy climbed into Sam's truck and buckled her seatbelt. "Sam?" She asked tentatively.
"Yah?"
"What's with Moby Dick?" She held up the box.
He raised his eyebrows, his eyes wide. "Well… It's a book about a whale. Actually I'm wrong." He tapped on the cover of the box. "That's not a book, it's an audio book."
Andy tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. "Nice. Sarcasm. Seriously though. You had a copy in that crappy apartment when you were with the Drug Squad. And you had a copy when you went UC with guns and gangs. And now your dad has a copy…"
Sam gave a heavy sigh and stared forward, considering what he was to say next. At last he turned to Andy and said, "When I was like fifteen or sixteen they had this family day event here. Usually you don't get to see the cells, but since my dad was in minimum security and the guards were escorting us around, they let us that time. And there on my dad's little bookshelf was that set of disks." He pointed to the battered copy. "I don't even know where he got it. The prison library, maybe? Maybe some nun gave it to him. I dunno." He shrugged. "But as soon as I was old enough I tracked down a copy on Ebay. Two tapes, read by Christopher Plummer. Riveting stuff." He chuckled. "I've listened to that damn audio book more times than I can count. I dunno, I think I just wanted to get inside my dad's head for once. Thought maybe Moby Dick could give me some insight into why he did what he did." Sam shook his head, defeated. "You know what I learned from that damn book?"
Softly, she asked, "What?"
"Nothing. That's what. It's just a stupid story about a man obsessed with a whale to the point where it becomes destructive and it destroys him. It was just like him. Obsessed with drugs, selling them, using them. Fiction come to life."
Andy's eyebrows furrowed, confused. "But you still listen to them…?"
He shrugged his shoulders and nodded his head. "I keep thinking I'll hear something new. Like there's some hidden message from my father in them." He snorted and looked away. "As if Christopher Plummer himself would say that my dad was sorry for everything. Sorry for leaving my mother, that he was sorry he was stupid and did drugs. That he was sorry he wasn't around to look after Sarah and me… For all of it." He pressed the ball of his hand into his temple as if it would somehow will the painful memories away.
"Sam…" Andy pulled his hand from his face. "Your father loved you." He scoffed at her statement. "No," she insisted, continuing. "He did. Maybe he didn't tell you he was sorry, but he kept a damn ice cream lid from when you were six. Trust me. He was sorry."
Sam sucked in a deep breath. At last he said, "I just want to go home." With a wordless nod from Andy, he started the truck and pulled out of the lot.
oOo
When Sam opened the door to his house he immediately headed to his room to change; Andy made herself comfortable on the sofa. Opening her purse she took out the Moby Dick boxset. As she was moving it toward the coffee table, the two tapes tumbled out, the battered lip of the box having opened with ease from years of use.
As Andy reached to put the tapes back into the box, she noticed that they didn't seem to be in the typical style of standard production cassettes. Instead, there was a strip of masking tape, curled from age, stuck to each. One read "SAM", the other "SARAH."
"Sam?" Andy called out. He appeared from his room, pulling a fresh t-shirt over his head. She held up the cassette with his name on it. "Do you have a tape player?"
A good hour later and a storage shed in shambles, they finally located Sam's old tape player. Its handle hung loose on one end and the battery portion had white corrosion from acid build up, but thankfully Sam had had the forethought to loop its plug around the base of the tape player.
They set it up on the coffee table using an extension cord to reach the nearest plug. Sam swallowed hard and looked to Andy as though the next step wasn't so obvious. She nodded and took the tape from his hands. After some fumbling, she managed to fit it in the deck door and closed it.
Pressing play, Sam sat back against the sofa with Andy curled into his lap. The silence of the room was deafening as they waited for the tape to catch. "Is this thing working?" A deep, throaty voice echoed from the player. Tap, tap, tap. Andy let out a soft chuckle, as Sam's dad seemed to check to make sure the mic was on.
"Hey Sammy. It's me, Dad. One of the nuns around here let me use this tape recorder thingy so I can record you a message. You know how I am with technology." Sam chortled. That was his dad, alright.
"Anyway, I hope when I get around to giving you this tape you're not mad at me. I mean, I don't think you are, but having a dad in prison can't exactly be a cakewalk with your mom and school and stuff. I hope you're looking after Sarah and your mother and are being the man of the house. You watch out for them. Especially your sister. She might be older but you take care of her, be a good little brother to her, okay?"
Sam took in a deep, shaky breath. He let his hand find their way to Andy's arm, where he let his fingers touch her skin, reassuring him. Calming him.
"Sammy… I made some mistakes you know? I'm not proud of them. I don't like being in jail. I'd rather be with you guys. Maybe teaching you how to play hockey or baseball. Hell, I'd even teach you football and I hate that damn game… I just want to show you how to be a better man than I was. Hopefully you will be anyway. Your mom seems to be doing a pretty good job.
"Your mom says that the school gave you an award for volunteer hours. That's pretty damn good, kid. Pretty damn good." He paused. "I just want you to know that I'm proud of you. I think about you all every day… so don't you forget that." His voice cracked, pitching higher than before. "Love ya, kid."
The tape clicked to a stop. Andy and Sam didn't move, nor did they speak, frozen on the sofa, digesting everything.
Eventually Sam swallowed hard, clicked his tongue against his teeth and sighed heavily. He ran his hand through his hair, rustling it nervously. "That was one hell of an apology," he said, barely audible, his voice beginning to lack control.
Andy nodded her head and offered a small "yeah." She sat up and pulled him toward her. "Definitely." With his head against her chest, he finally let go of the hurt, the anger and the resentment.
While she wasn't entirely certain of the whole story, Andy had gotten a glimpse into a life that Sam seemed to have locked away and kept hidden, behind his own prison walls. As the afternoon turned into night, they sat in mostly silence. Occasionally Sam would recount a story from his childhood, sometimes it was about his sister, other times his mother, but mostly they were stories about his father. A man who whose son had barely known him outside of prison bars, but a man who loved his son nevertheless and had finally found a way to show it.
.:FIN:.
Reviews feed my soul. Please leave one?