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chapter eleven
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'cause love doesn't hurt
so i know i'm not falling in love
i'm just falling to pieces
-Anna Nalick, "Wreck of the Day"
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Sam ran through the familiar woods near the trailer park in Kenosha, the dry leaves crunching beneath her feet with every step. It was winter: the trees were bare, the wind stung her cheeks as it whipped through. Everything around her was dark and dead, and there was no sign of life anywhere in sight.
She kept running and running and running until ...
CRACK.
She tripped and fell forward, landing awkwardly in a pile of leaves on the cold ground. She untangled her upper limbs and tried to hoist herself up off the ground, only to fall forward once again, unable to support her own weight. She winced and cried out in pain.
It was then that she noticed the dark red blood seeping through her jeans and onto the ground before her: she was bleeding profusely, and her leg was obviously broken.
As she struggled to get up and keep going, her eyes landed behind her on the object that had caused her to trip. It was a shovel that she knew extremely well; after all, it was her shovel, and she had refused to touch it since she was fourteen years old.
She heard a rustling of leaves, and Jack stepped out from behind a cluster of trees.
"Jack!" She cried out. "Help me!"
Jack walked forward, but remained silent.
"Help me, please!" She insisted with more urgency. "I have to get to Randy in time."
He leaned forward and picked up her up, but then turned to walk back in another direction woods. She fought him adamantly, yelling that she had to go back towards the cabin and to where Randy was, but it did no good.
He reached the clearing and placed Sam on the ground.
"Jack!" She cried out. "You were supposed to help me."
He gazed down to where she sat and replied, "This did not happen. It's over. You don't have to worry about it anymore."
He said nothing more.
"Help me!" she cried in desperation. "Someone help me! Emily! Martin!"
"Anyone?!"
She once again tried to stand but could not even get up on her knees. Her body shook, paralyzed with fear, when she realized that she was not sitting on just any ground in any clearing.
This was where she had buried Joe Henry.
She cried out desperately as darkness began to settle around her...
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In New York City, Sam woke with a start. She shot up in bed, her heart pounding in her chest at warp speed as she gasped for breath. She threw off the bed spread, feeling clammy all over, and flung her legs over the side of the bed.
An intense wave of nausea hit her like a ton of bricks, and she ran quickly to the bathroom. She held her head over the toilet and wretched several times, but it was nothing but dry heaves.
She cradled her head in her hands, not caring that her elbows were propped up on the porcelain seat of her toilet, and quietly waited for the nausea to pass. Her legs weak and her joints aching, she finally rose to steady herself in front of her bathroom sink. She turned the tap and splashed cool water on her face.
She shuffled back into bed before allowing herself to check the clock on her bedside table: 3:27 AM. Fantastic.
She rolled over onto her side and tried to get comfortable, but she began to toss and turn and sleep would not come. She shifted again, using the whole bed in an attempt to find a position where she could minimize the discomfort and soreness that plagued her entire body.
But in the end, it was the disquiet that plagued her mind that would keep her awake.
This was the fourth night in a row that she'd had a variation on the same nightmare, and she could neither shake the haunting images from her mind nor decipher their meaning. But though she did not understand what the dream meant, it did not take a degree in psychology to connect the day she had donated bone marrow to the day the nightmares first started.
As she tossed and turned and tried in vain to get comfortable, she felt an undeniable sense of foreboding settle over her. She could no longer write it off as a side effect of marrow donation, now four days removed. The nausea, fatigue, and soreness were all decreasing and becoming more bearable, but every night, the dreams were getting worse.
An eerie feeling settled around her as she lay in bed and tried to make sense of the images flashing across her mind's eye. The most overwhelming image was that of the look on Jack's face, cold and final, as he left her alone at the edge of the clearing; her mind spun in endless circles as she tried to decide with certainty what it all meant.
When she was brutally honest with herself, she realized just how furious she was with Jack for the way he butted in and prevented her from coming forward with the truth, once and for all. Though she was grateful that she did not have to deal with the fallout of the legal circus that would have ensued, that appreciation ran only deep enough to keep her emotions in check, especially after she broke down and told Martin everything.
A long time ago, she vowed to never let another man get close enough to know the deepest, darkest secrets of her past. What surprised her was that she had expected Jack to be the one who would support her, as he had so many dark secrets of his own. And when she had been least expecting it, she let her guard down when the impulse to confide in someone of her own free will was too great to overcome. The overwhelming relief at having confided in Martin came as a surprise, after having spent such tremendous amounts of energy in the past to keep him in the dark for fear that he would see her for who she really was and hate her for it.
But instead, he had looked up at her with his blue eyes full of intensity and deep emotion that she could not quite place, and he had listened to her without passing judgment, much in the same way he had first asked her about Jack.
And telling him felt as though she had lifted a weight from her shoulders, confusing her more than ever. She could still feel the adrenaline coursing through her veins when she realized what she had done, all of her carefully planned logic and rationale tossed to one side. After all, Martin was not supposed to be allowed near the dark corners of her heart, and the one man who was, was not supposed to treat it was such disregard.
These thoughts still plagued her mind as she succumbed to a light, restless sleep an hour later.
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When she awoke later that same morning, the sun was shining brightly, seeping in through the cracks in her bedroom curtains. She yawned and stretched, and the sunlight stung her eyes, the side effects of her fitful slumber.
As she sat up in bed and massaged the sore muscles in the back of her neck, she glanced at the clock to discover that it was well past 10:00. She shivered as she rose from the bed, the drafty air in her apartment hitting the bare skin on her arms. She padded into the kitchen and opened the first set of cabinets. She leaned against the counter and reached up, retrieving the first glass her hand came in contact with. She felt tired and achy and desperately craved her morning coffee, but her doctors had advised her to eat healthily and keep well hydrated until she was feeling at one hundred percent. So instead she pressed the glass against the filter set in her refrigerator, listening as the ice maker whirred to life and a few cubes fell into her glass with a clinking noise. She then slid the control to 'water' and waited until the glass filled.
As she raised the glass to her lips and began to sip, her eyes fell on the few memos she had tacked up on her otherwise bare refrigerator door. In particular, they focused in on the business card that her brother in law and left for her when Andrew and Emily had come to dinner just over a week ago.
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Sam bustled around her kitchen while she waited for the coffee to brew, setting out three mugs by the coffee maker and then immediately moving to wipe off the rest of the counter top.
Just as the coffee as almost ready, she heard soft footsteps behind her and turned around to see Andrew enter the kitchen.
"Hey," he said, motioning his hand towards the dirty dishes in the sink. "Can I do anything to help?"
"No. I think I've got it covered, but thanks," she shook her head and smiled awkwardly. She swallowed and inhaled and said, "Listen, Andrew, I know we didn't exactly start off in the best of terms, and I know most of that is my fault. But I would really like to make things right. I know it's important ... to Emily."
Andrew nodded seriously and said, "Yes, it is. And I'm sorry too. I'll admit that I wasn't exactly receptive to meeting you after what happened ... with our wedding. But now that she's told me the whole story, I understand why you both drifted apart..."
He trailed off, and Sam narrowed her eyes as she breathed in. She felt the remorse tug at her heart at the mention of Emily and Andrew's wedding. She had ripped up the invitation instantly upon receiving it and had ignored every one of Emily's calls, having no intention of being present at her sister's wedding when Emily had been one of the major factors in the downfall of her own marriage.
But years later, her own bitterness no longer seemed as important and she regretted not going.
"Anyway," Andrew said, stepping forward to help her pour the coffee, "I just wanted to say thank you for everything you've done for us. Making sure you found her safely, and now with the transplant ... It means a lot, to both of us."
"Really," she insisted quietly, "It's no big deal. I have a lot of vacation time built up."
Andrew leaned back against the counter, holding his mug in one hand and crossing his arms, "Still, it means a lot... I don't know much about the transplant process, but Emily did say that it's less invasive."
Sam placed the other two mugs back down on the counter top, wiping her hands on her sides as she explained matter-of-factly, "Yeah, it's a pretty new procedure from what I've been told, but it's been proven just as effective between blood relatives... It's called peripheral blood stem cell transplant. I'll get something called filgrastim every day next week to increase white blood cell production. After five days I'll go through apheresis. They take blood from a vein in one arm, filter out the blood forming cells that they need, and then transplant the rest of the blood back into my other arm. The doctor at the transplant center said that it's basically like donating platelets at the blood bank."
"That's good," Andrew replied with a nod, reaching into the back pocket of his slacks and pulling out a business card. "I know you already have Emily's cell number," he said as he placed the card underneath a magnet on her refrigerator, "But here's my contact information. Don't hesitate to call either one of us if you need anything, Samantha."
Sam smiled as he took a second mug from her and headed back into the living room to sit on the sofa beside Emily.
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As Sam stood at the doorway of her kitchen, she glanced back to the living room and recalled the ease between Emily and Andrew as they sat on her sofa that night. She had watched surreptitiously as they seemed just as comfortable sharing quiet conversation as they did when they were sitting in silence. It struck a chord somewhere deep within her that in spite of her initial impression, Andrew seemed to be a good guy who made her sister happy, and maybe that was the most important thing.
Her own track record with relationships was nothing more than an extension of the string of bad relationships she had grown up around: her own parents' short-lived marriage and endless fighting, her mother's constant string of boyfriends who were never around much, Emily and Joe Henry. Then there was her own short-lived marriage, her affair with Jack, a few scattered men who barely merit mentioning, and Martin, who simply defied every one of her rules for relationships that had previously been set in stone. Her previous relationships not outlasting five months, the nine months she spent with Martin had seemed a lifetime in comparison.
She wondered at how Emily and Andrew had been married for ten years, a feat that seemed near impossible to her, until she realized that she had been looking at relationships through a cracked lens for all these years.
Complicated was almost never better. And maybe, in fact, love was not inherently supposed to hurt.
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