You're never quite sure how it makes you feel when the air changes, when the first cold front of the year sweeps down out of the north and you know for sure that summer is really over. There is a brief sense of loss, and finality, but then you shiver as you walk out to your car after work, and you think of how Halloween will soon be here, then Thanksgiving, then the lights and snow and atmosphere of Christmastime.
You are halfway across the parking lot when you think of how you haven't seen her in years. The full weight of it hits you, and you stop, with your arms crossed over your body and the wind whipping your hair, and you try to fully understand that: years. You shuffle quickly to your car and climb in. The sky floats darkly, close to the earth, and gusts of wind howl outside, and you wish your sweatshirt was in the back seat, but you're never prepared for the changing of seasons, so you start your car and shiver in your seat while waiting for the heater to heat up.
You've managed to keep her out of your thoughts, mostly, but right now the memories of blond curls and ham breath might be the only thing keeping you warm. The first spatter of raindrops pop against your windshield. You slip your Starflyer 59 cd into the stereo and throw the car in drive.
You follow the lonely highway out to the suburbs, and even though you make stops - at the library, at the dry cleaner, at Monorail to order their soup of the day and a toasted sandwich to take home for dinner - she dances at the edge of your awareness. She dances; not enough to distract you from paying attention to the slick roads, but she is there, like a passenger in the back seat who can't hear you, or talk, or answer your questions.
The road twists through miles of deep pine forest, then descends down the steep hill that leads to your town. You can see your town flaring to life down there in the valley. The clouds are grey and heavy at twilight, hanging low over the buzz of distant neon signs. You're almost home.
And still she is dancing.
The cold and rain last for weeks, and you keep on going through the motions of daily living, and you start to wonder what she's doing out there in the world.
And the same old thoughts are keeping you awake at nights - the ones that aren't about her - but now she's invading that time, too; and it's hard to decide which torment is preferable.
Some nights, when it's her, you relive those last days of high school, your hindsight magnifying all those little clues that should've told you she was growing more distant, even though there were so many times you held her hair back while she puked, or talked her down, or picked her up in the middle of the night from bad parts of town, from dangerous people's houses.
Why won't she leave you alone after all these years? Sometimes at work you talk to people on the phone who remind you of her. When you go to Spencer's on the weekends, you space out and remember back when you had a web show, back when memories were made every day inside that apartment, and you wonder how many moments you've forgotten.
And so you think there must be some mystic power at work in the universe, some force of mind that can affect reality, because there is no way it can be a coincidence when you come home from work one day and there's an email from her telling you that she'll be back home in Seattle in a few days, and could you kindly pick her up at the bus station?
The tall street lamps shining at the edge of the parking lot cast countless little golden prisms off all the wet car hoods and windshields. You fidget in your car seat, scratch patterns into the upholstery with your fingernails. Your window is cracked just a bit to let a stream of cool air circulate, and you wish you still smoked because you could really use a cigarette right now. You focus on the in and out of your breathing, counting 1 to 4 on each inhale and exhale, and you don't even see her approach, but suddenly your passenger door is open and she's throwing a suitcase and a duffel bag into your back seat, then crashing her body into the seat next to you and pulling her seatbelt to a cinch.
"Hey, Carls," she says.
"Sam," you say, clearing your throat. "How was your trip?"
"Eh, being stuck in close quarters with stinky weirdos and parolees for 14 hours kind of sucked, but other than that, not too bad." She adjusts her seat back, leans into it, and settles in while you crank the car up and shift into drive. She props her knee against your glove box so that her foot hangs over the floorboard, then jerks her thumb at the back seat. "All my worldly possessions."
"Really?" you stammer. "You don't have anything else being shipped, or something?"
"Nah," she yawns. "Fresh start, you know?"
Your mix CD skips to the next track, and even though you have the volume down low she recognizes the song that comes on, says, "Ooh, I love American Music Club," as she leans forward and thumbs the volume knob up a little bit.
"They're pretty good," you agree. You're shivering a bit now that you're out on the highway and picking up speed, and little drops of rain are shaking loose through the crack in your window, so you roll it up, and sigh. You will your hands to stay steady at the 2 and 10 positions on your steering wheel, but Sam's whole body seems to quiver in time to the ringing notes that open the song.
"Decibels and little pills," she mumbles the lyrics quietly, and her face is rounder now, fuller than before she left, though her hair is still a cascade of magic blonde whorls. "This is one of those songs you feel with everything you have," she says.
"Yeah?"
"When you really feel music, it's physical. It's like an energy pulsing through your body. It makes your emotions swell and soar. And your mind... your mind just shuts off all the things that usually bother it, and just focuses on the moment and how good it all feels. It moves every part of you."
You nod, swallow. "I like the idea of your mind shutting out all the bothersome stuff."
She smiles and turns sideways in her seat to face you. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be talking about all this like it's no big deal."
"Why?"
"I have a lot to make up for, don't I?"
You shrug, because you don't know what to say, and you both ride the rest of the way in near silence, except for when you stop at a late night chicken joint for her to pick up a large box of fried tenders.
You turn off into a dark, quiet, tree-lined neighborhood and drive to the end of the block. You pull into the driveway of the small house you were able to buy with your iCarly money, and help her carry her luggage inside. She dumps the luggage in a pile by the futon in the living room, then throws her chicken in the microwave while you give her a quick tour - the tiny patio where you used to go smoke, the picnic table in the back yard, the bathroom you can only reach by going through your bedroom, the washer and drier out in the garage.
She stands at your kitchen counter eating her chicken tenders, forcing you to eat one too, and asks what you've been doing since you graduated college last year. She tells you how good things are for you, how proud she is that you have a real job and a house, and a life. You nod and smile, but you want to scream at her that what looks like a life is really just a set of obligations, a series of hollow activities set up to distract you. It's not a life at all, you want to tell her.
She finishes her last chicken tender, brushes the crumbs from her fingers, and stuffs the box in your trash can. You sip some milk out of the little bottle in the fridge, and before you can offer her the couch to sleep on she's already kicked off her shoes and thrown her jacket on the floor and fallen on the left side of your bed, inviting herself to share it with you.
"Okay," you mumble to yourself, and walk to the short hallway between your bedroom and bathroom where the sink is to brush your teeth. You slide the flimsy partition closed, because you don't want her to see the ritual you go through every night before bed.
You come out in boxers and a T shirt. She's already dozing lightly on the bed, still in her jeans, on her side with her body curled like a question mark. You turn your little TV on and push the volume all the way down, then slide under your covers and turn your bedside lamp off.
You lay there, looking straight up, watching the TV cast faint, shifting echoes of color on the ceiling, and you wait. Long ago you assumed it was natural for life and death to preoccupy your thoughts as you grew older, but these night time ponderings on mortality got to be too much, and even these days they still nip at you as you're falling into sleep. And oh, God, Sam's body is radiating heat. She's so close, yet so distant. You let out a deep sigh, because there is Love, and there is Death, and what else matters?
Suddenly she rolls over toward you, as if your sigh had called out to her. She burrows close as her arm locks around your hip. She's attached her body to yours, and her breath is breaking against your shoulder, and for the first night in as long as you can remember there are no tormenting thoughts, and you fall asleep easily.
"Are you sure you're cool with me staying here?" she asks the next morning. She's laying on her side, facing you, her face blank as if steeling herself in case you've changed your mind, but her eyes are twin sapphires flecked with silver, unguarded, vulnerable, and what else can you say but, "Of course."
You roll out of bed and head for the bathroom.
"Still got a stick body," she says from the bed.
"Sam," you chide, crossing your arms over your hips, but she is grinning, and you return it, because even after all these years it still feels natural for her to gently tease you.
You come home that evening, shake the rain off your jacket and hang it by the door. She's in the kitchen, with clouds of vapor roiling in the air.
"Nice Acura out in the driveway," you say.
"Thanks. Otto brought it by around 2 this afternoon. It's ten years old, but it's got a new motor in it."
"Nice."
"And I have some jobs leads to follow up on tomorrow, so I can put it to use."
Your kitchen counter is a mess of empty bags and chopped vegetable bits - that much about her hasn't changed - but she's making chicken noodle soup. While she stirs the pot you lean against the sink and talk to her about what sorts of jobs she'll be checking out. A warm sensation begins to radiate outward from inside you as you talk, and you realize why you'd been so distracted at work today - you couldn't wait to come home and just be near her and talk. You don't care if you're talking about the most mundane crap in the world, you just want to communicate.
You squeeze your eyes shut, and breath deeply, and shut that feeling off.
After you both eat and clean the dishes, she follows you out to the little covered patio. You both sit on the cold concrete and listen to the rain fall in the back yard. You smoke a cigarette out of the emergency pack you keep hidden in an empty plant pot, because you need something to steady you, because your insides are alternately swelling in waves and jittering. You smoke, and nod, and let her talk, and she's talking about everything except that topic, but you know in the awkward pauses that she's thinking hard how she should bring it up. Maybe she's waiting for you to bring it up, but you don't know how, either. She moves on to a story about hitch hiking through Texas, but her voice is ringing and distant. You puff furiously at your cigarette. You wish you could just make that memory die, that memory of her last night in Seattle before she left. And then, faintly, you begin to hope that it will die on its own, alone, buried under the weight of new memories yet to be made.
She sleeps beside you every night, curled on her side, breathing softly for hours. The wan TV colors shift across the ceiling, while the rain drones against the window, and you listen to the slow rhythm of her breath. And every time she murmurs softly, or shifts her weight the slightest, or scratches her nose in her sleep, you want to wake her up and let her know that if you were ever in some Flight 93 situation that you would be thinking of her. Despite everything, your last thoughts would be of Sam Puckett, and those thoughts would be what comforts you through the transition.
The rain finally lets up on Friday, which is good because it's Halloween - your favorite holiday. You come home early and Sam helps you hang little rubber bats and ghosts from the hooks on your front porch where you're supposed to hang flower pots. She already has a jack o lantern ready to go on the front stoop. She helps you carry mummy figurines and bloody plastic dolls out into the yard, and you have to drive their feet into the ground because the wind is still strong enough to knock them over if you didn't.
Sam lights a candle in the pumpkin when darkness falls, and you snap a glow stick and go tie it to your mailbox. It's too cold to sit out on the front steps, so you both go inside to wait for the first trick or treaters.
"This day really does feel spooky," Sam says, her hand in the candy bowl, absently stirring.
"It does," you say. "There's a definite... I don't know, an atmosphere, I guess."
"It's supposed to be the day when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is thinnest; when the spirits are able to cross over." She shrugs. "Maybe there really is something to that."
Before you can reply the first trick or treaters are knocking at your door, and it's a herd of pre-schoolers dressed like superheroes, and their parents compliment you on the scariness of your front yard.
After that it's a steady wave all evening - little clowns, princesses, teenaged Frankensteins too old to be trick or treating but you give them candy anyway.
"I love this," you giggle to Sam as a gang of ninja turtles trudge away from your yard, their sacks loaded with the miniature candy bars you've been handing out all evening.
The traffic slows down later into the evening, and it grows quiet out in the neighborhood. The shouts and laughs out in the streets seem fainter, spaced farther apart. Your last visitor is a boy, about 10 years old, wrapped in torn bed sheets like a mummy, who asks for extra candy for his kid sister. You look out toward the street and see a little girl playing with the glow stick you'd tied to the mailbox.
"She's too scared to come into your yard," the boy explains.
You and Sam laugh, and give the boy all the candy that was left in the bowl, but only after making him promise to share it with his sister.
He promises, and leaves, and then the streets are silent.
"It's still officially Halloween for a little while," Sam says. "You want to walk around the neighborhood? Soak up some of the atmosphere?"
You both shrug into coats and step outside, stopping to snuff the remnant of candle that still flickers inside the jack o lantern, and walk out to the street.
"Hey, that little girl stole my glow stick," you say.
Sam chuckles, and you begin to follow her along the sidewalk. She points out a house that's been egged, a yard that's been wrapped in toilet paper, a creepy spider web decoration on someone's front porch.
At the end of the block you both stand near the stop sign and listen. There are no cars on the road, and no other voices.
"It's a Friday," you say.
Sam shrugs. "It's late. All the kids are back home, all the older people are at parties."
You look up and see that the clouds have finally been pushed out. It's finally clear overhead, and the wind seems to magnify the darkness of the sky and the shimmer of the stars.
"I guess," you say, and follow the sidewalk to the next street over.
"I totally think you had the scariest house in the neighborhood, though," Sam says as she walks alongside you.
"Yeah?"
"S'yeah. Those bloody dolls are creepy. And that's the first time I've ever seen a kid too scared to come get candy!"
"Haha. Yeah, I just want them to have some good memories when they get older."
She makes a sound like she agrees, but then falls silent, and you round the corner to the next street, heading back to circle the block, and the only sound now is the clicking of your shoes on the dead, wet leaves that litter the sidewalks.
"You think they'll have good memories?" you finally ask.
She seems to be thinking about it, considering her answer. Along this street there are still carved pumpkin faces glowing dimly on doorsteps, and paper witches swinging from trees.
She shrugs. "I think memory always fades, and that all we have is right now."
"Yeah?"
"How much do you remember from when you were those kids' age? I can barely remember being 10 or 12 years old. I mean, I have a general impression of how it all felt; you know, all those weekends we laid around in our pajamas watching Girly Cow, but nothing real specific. No meaningful incidents really stick out."
"Hmm." You clear your throat. "If you think about it, most of the incidents in our lives aren't really important. The majority of them aren't. They should be forgotten."
By now you've reached the last house on this street. You stop in front of it, because hanging from their mailbox is a paper skeleton, about a foot long, a beautiful little symbol of death, with thin and fragile limbs twisting in the wind.
You stop, and watch it flutter.
You feel her behind you, and then her chin is on your shoulder and her arms are locking across you. "I came back, didn't I?" Her body collapses against your back. "I had to come back."
You can only pat the hands that are clasped across your breastbone, and nod.
"I'm not going anywhere again," she promises.
You lay in bed and talk deep into the night. You talk about the things you did in college, and the things she did when she was out there in the world. You talk about that topic, and how sometimes it takes years for us to find out who we are. You talk about the future, and all the things the two of you will do together, and the changes you'll both make.
You think maybe you dozed off for a little bit, because you notice that she hasn't said anything in a while. She's curled on her side, facing you, eyes shut, breathing in slow, deep measures. You finally drift off into sleep sometime around dawn, when the first light of the morning sun starts to swell through the window blinds.